BOOKS BY SHANE LESLIE 

Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



THE IRISH ISSUE IN ITS AMERICAN 

ASPECTS. 12mo .... net $1.25 

THE CELT AND THE WORLD. 12mo net 1.25 

THE END OF A CHAPTER. 12mo . net 1.25 



The Irish Issue 
In Its American Aspect 



The Irish Issue 
In Its American Aspect 

A Contribution to the 

Settlement of Anglo-American Relations 

During and After the Great War 



By 

Shane Leslie 



New York 

Charles Scribner's Sons 

1917 



V 



Copyright, 1917, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published November, 1917 




NOV 27 1917 

©CU479239 



TO 

HENRY C. IDE 

LATE GOVERNOR OF THE PHILIPPINES 

AND 

U. S. MINISTER TO SPAIN 



CONTENTS 

PART ONE 

PAGE 

America's Family Ghost 3 

The Centenary of John Mitchel 17 

The Memory of Parnell 33 

The Treason of the Redmonds 61 

The Ethics of Sinn Fein 71 

The Presidency of Pearse 81 

The Killing of Kettle 94 

Carson and Casement 106 

PART TWO 

The Winning of the United States 121 

Irish America During the War 177 

Epilogue 207 



Part I 



I 

AMERICA'S FAMILY GHOST 

Ireland is the spectre of the British Empire. 
Sometimes she seems to fill the position of 
America's family ghost as well. Uncle Sam is 
far too good and young to be haunted as some 
of the European nations are haunted by the 
undying phantasms of those they oppressed. 
Only the picturesque wraith of the Red Indian 
broods upon the prairies of the West. If the 
American has pressed into other lands than his 
original colonies, it has always been to redeem 
and civilise, never to enslave persons or dese- 
crate territory. No ghost came out of the 
Philippines to decry his record before the na- 
tions. His Cuban conscience is clean. The 
Queen of Hawaii, the pride of Spain, and the 
Pekin summer palace need never trouble his 
soul. The hazard of the world brought each 
into his way and he dealt with them severally, 
as a gentleman should under the circumstances. 
The American gentleman is so by national 
tradition rather than by individual birth. Dis- 

3 



4 THE IRISH ISSUE 

tressed nations make the same appeal to his 
sense of chivalry that distressed ladies used to 
make to the European knight. He is largely 
descended from those who at different times 
have made good their release from the English 
Tory, the German Junker, and the Irish land- 
lord. There is a gulf between the old families 
of America and the European aristocrats, whose 
past deeds cause phantoms to scream about the 
banners of their country, whenever unfurled 
even in the justest cause. 

If America has a ghost, it is Ireland. But if 
Ireland haunts America, it is with a haunting 
based on love and not on hate. Like the Janus 
of the Atlantic, Ireland is two-faced. Towards 
England she ever looks with anguish and bit- 
terness, towards the United States with tearful 
hope and wistful affection. For in the nine- 
teenth century America was to Ireland what 
France was in the eighteenth, la grande nation ! 
The strongest and choicest went into their 
service, military in the case of France, indus- 
trial in that of America. The canals and then 
the railways of America were created by Irish 
labour. The industrial connection found 
apotheosis in the names of McCormick and 
Ford. 

Ireland has always believed that her freedom 



AMERICA'S FAMILY GHOST 5 

was due to her through American means. No 
European country was better represented in 
the Revolutionary ranks. Deep in Irish hearts 
was laid the unwritten covenant that out of 
America Ireland should be reborn, out of the 
strong sweetness. It was unwritten officially, 
save in the script of Benjamin Franklin, who 
had attended the debates in the old Dublin 
Parliament and inscribed Ireland in the list of 
the revolting colonies to be united against 
England. Since then sympathy with Ireland 
has become a tradition in the United States, 
lisped by statesmen and even pronounced by 
Presidents. More than once Americans have 
threatened to obtain by force what the Great 
War brought them a striking opportunity to 
procure by peaceful consent. 

It is curious indeed how Irish action and re- 
action has run like an uncanny spirit through 
the woof of American history. Before the 
Revolution, Ireland and the American colonies 
were plaintiffs in the same suit. Molyneux's 
famous Case of Ireland Stated, the first hand- 
book of Irish nationalism, became a text-book 
to American thinkers. Otis's Rights of the Col- 
onies was its adaptation. Rebels, whether in 
Ireland or in America, were the same children 
of the stormy time-spirit loosed in the last dec- 



6 THE IRISH ISSUE 

ades of the eighteenth century. Lord Charle- 
mont, the head of the Irish Volunteers, used 
to be toasted as the "Irish Washington." 
When America exchanged her suit for an ap- 
peal to arms, Ulstermen helped her as bravely 
in America as they helped Wexford's appeal 
to arms in 1798. Ulstermen were always the 
most revolutionary members of the English- 
speaking world and in no town of the empire 
was the capture of the Bastille more fiercely 
celebrated than in Belfast. 

American independence had as great an 
effect on Ireland as the Russian revolution has 
had on the modern world at large. It left Ire- 
land dreamily ambitious, eternally unsettled, 
and enamoured of the sunset in the West. 
Only the perennial safety-valve of emigration 
out of the political wilderness at home into the 
Promised Republic prevented explosions in Ire- 
land. Relations between Ireland and the 
United States began immediately. Catholic 
and Protestant, Ulstermen and Irishmen, "the 
sons of Uladh and of Erinn," as the old writers 
divided Irishmen, were one in hailing American 
independence. There is no doubt that Lord 
North's first conciliatory act towards the Irish 
Catholics was due to the desire to foreclose 
sympathy with the Revolutionary States. 






AMERICAS FAMILY GHOST 7 

Oddly enough the same hired Hessians were 
loosed on rebels in Ireland and America. 

It is a historical point whether the American 
Revolution would have succeeded, had it not 
been for the feud of the exiled Ulstermen with 
the English Tories. The original Bunker's Hill 
is near Belfast. Both Scotch and Milesian 
Irish rallied to Washington. No fewer than 
thirteen of the Revolutionary generals were 
born in Ireland herself. It was historically 
poetic how memories of the different Irish re- 
bellions found echoes in America's wars. Rob- 
ert Francis Paine, who with eight others of 
Irish kindred, signed the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, was really an O'Neill, sixth in de- 
scent from Shane O'Neill, who had held Ulster 
against Elizabeth. General James Moore, who 
took the field for the insurgents, was descended 
from Rory O'More, the most romantic figure 
in the Rising of 1641. General Clinton found 
"the emigrants from Ireland our most serious 
antagonists." Washington's aides included a 
Fitzgerald and Stephen Moylan, a brother of 
the then Bishop of Cork. It was a Barry of 
Wexford who took the new American flag to 
sea. There is an entire tradition of the Irish 
share in the Revolution. A Sullivan fired the 
first shot and captured Fort William and Mary, 



8 THE IRISH ISSUE 

avenging the battle of the Boyne thereby. 
The British General Fraser fell to a sniper 
called Murphy. An Irishman ferried Wash- 
ington across the Delaware and a Lynch kept 
the doors of the first Congress. It is claimed 
that Molly Pitcher was an Irish girl of the 
family of Hayes. Certain it is that the 
Friendly Sons of St. Patrick raised a "Liberty 
Loan" for Washington. And when it came to 
peace, it was on the farm of an Irish Carroll 
that the White House was erected on the 
model of Leinster House in Dublin. The 
Feast of St. Patrick had already passed into 
the American calendar. During the Revolu- 
tion it had proved a lucky day for the United 
States. On that day in 1776 the English 
evacuated Boston and on that day in the 
following year a French ship arrived with a 
stand of arms. 

Ireland and America went their ways, 
though, as Professor Dunning well states in 
his work on Anglo-American relations: "There 
survived in the United States the tradition of 
Grattan's Parliament, which received the 
breath of life through the success of the war 
that made America free from Great Britain." 

When war broke out afresh between England 
and America in 1812 Ireland lifted no voice. 



AMERICA'S FAMILY GHOST 9 

Her revolutionary zeal had been quenched in 
the Rising of 1798, and her adventurous youth 
had gone with "Charles O'Malley" into Wel- 
lington's armies. But in America there were 
no less than six of the "United Irishmen" in 
Congress to vote for war against England, while 
hosts of exiles took their part in that amazing 
campaign which gave America her national 
anthem. It was then that Commodore Stew- 
art, the grandfather of Parnell, won his naval 
honours against the British fleet and that An- 
drew Jackson, the son of an Ulsterman, slew 
and defeated Pakenham at the battle of New 
Orleans. It was in keeping with historical jus- 
tice, for Pakenham was one of the corrupt oli- 
garchs who had sold the old Parliament in 
Dublin. 

During the hostilities it required special ef- 
forts to obtain the treatment of prisoners of 
war for captured Irish-Americans. Bad as was 
the measure meted out to all American prison- 
ers, it is pleasant to find Congress recognising 
the humanity which befell some who were sent 
to Ireland. After the war Irish matters tended 
to be forgotten in America. It was only two 
great and appalling events, which gave Ireland 
a new footing in the New World, from which 
she could bitterly and successfully oppose and 



10 THE IRISH ISSUE 

thwart some of England's dearest projects. 
They were the Irish Famine and the American 
Civil War. 

Sydney Smith had pointed out that "the 
disaffected state of Ireland is a standing pre- 
mium for war with every Cabinet which has 
the most distant intention of quarrelling with 
this country for any other cause." If the 
famine supplied the necessary disaffection, the 
Civil War led to serious Anglo-American quar- 
relling. 

The Irish famine emptied the strongest and 
best survivors of the race in shoals upon the 
American seaboard. At terrible cost and at 
an unrecorded loss the mighty transmigration 
was accomplished. Success and prosperity 
were by no means theirs for the questing, then 
or previously. For thousands who had per- 
ished as pioneers, history records the John Sul- 
livan, a centenarian schoolmaster from Limer- 
ick, who became the father of governors both 
of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and 
the grandfather of a governor of Maine. It 
was the same after the famine. For every one 
who left his mark or famous descendants, a 
thousand fell unknown in the struggle. Nev- 
ertheless numbers and morality told, and as 
F. Hugh O'Donnell pointed out: "From Presi- 



AMERICA'S FAMILY GHOST 11 

dents of the Republic to Presidents of Trusts, 
and from the pioneer founders of eastern cities 
to the mighty athletes of Olympian competi- 
tions, where will you not find Irish-Ameri- 
cans ? " Never again could Sydney Smith gibe 
the United States with ' where are their 
Burkes, their Sheridans ? " 

The Civil War gave the Irish a magnificent 
opportunity of proving their loyalty to the 
States. Irish services in the field outweighed 
any local indulgence in draught rioting. Arch- 
bishop Hughes was successfuly invoked by the 
civil authority to allay the riots and in death 
was honoured by a tribute from Lincoln. 
Archbishop Purcell hoisted "Old Glory," which 
perhaps may be Latinised as Gloria Patri Pa- 
trice, from the spires of Cincinnati Cathedral. 
As President Hayes said afterwards of this in- 
cident: "The spire was beautiful, but the Cath- 
olic Prelate made it radiant with hope and 
glory for our country." The events of the 
Civil War cemented Irish and American feeling. 
The Irish Brigade under Meagher died on the 
slopes of Fredericksburg, "one of the hand- 
somest things in the whole war," confessed 
Longstreet. A shaft marks where the Irish 
Sixty-ninth threw back Pickett's charge at 
Gettysburg. 



12 THE IRISH ISSUE 

In the seventies and eighties the Irish cause 
caught fire in America. There was the Ala- 
bama and the Trent to commend it to American 
taste. Sumner was more of a prophet than a 
politician when he said: "Justice to Ireland is 
a British necessity." There was even a sug- 
gestion in the House to recognise the "Irish 
Republic" as a belligerent. Soldiers returning 
from Appomattox took up the refrain "We're 
marching next to Ireland." The Eenian move- 
ment was cradled round the camp-fires of the 
Union. 

During the eighties the Irish-Americans 
reached their zenith. Governor Curtis stated 
that there were no less than forty-two Irish- 
men in the House, while one-half claimed to 
have Irish blood in their veins. It became al- 
most necessary for an American President to 
claim Irish blood to be a successful candidate. 
It was amusing how Cleveland's mother (Neal) 
was made to do duty against his rival Blaine's 
Irish grandfather (Gillespie). 

American ministers in London came to be 
acquainted intimately with the Irish question. 
Mr. Adams vexed his last days trying to pro- 
cure the release of Fenian prisoners. The Dub- 
lin police were able to do what Confederate fire 
could not and arrest Colonel Denis Bourke, 



AMERICA'S FAMILY GHOST 13 

who had been the first to cross the bloody 
angle at Spottsylvania. Lowell's ministry was 
perpetually troubled by Coercion Acts. He 
diagnosed Ireland not unskilfully as, "the clot 
of blood in England's veins always discomfort- 
able and liable always to lodge in the brain." 
All the great thinkers saw truly but were 
thwarted by the politicians. Goldwin Smith 
realised that "nothing stands in the way of a 
reconciliation between the two branches of the 
Anglo-Saxon race except the influence of the 
Irish." 

The war with Spain seemed to afford a pos- 
sibility of general reconciliation. On the one 
hand friendship sprang up between the Anglo- 
Saxon twain and on the other hand Irishmen 
were under arms for America. In the most 
brilliant exploit of the war Hobson's choice of 
companions included a Murphy and a Kelly. 
But the Boer War sent England and America 
their different ways and the Irish banshee set 
out to haunt both, one with remembrance of 
ancient wrong and the other with pleading of 
benefit performed. 

Two totally distinct views may naturally be 
taken as to the Irish infiltration into America. 
On the practical side we find Charles Norton 
writing: "The Irish have become inmates of 



14 THE IRISH ISSUE 

our houses to a degree of intimacy impossible 
if it had not been for their pecuniary honesty 
and their chastity." From the old-fashioned 
view of Saxon sentiment Professor Freeman 
grieved: "Alas, alas, in the oldest of the wooden 
houses when I went to find New England Puri- 
tans I found Ould Irish Papishes, Biddy instead 
of Hepzibah." Socially and domestically the 
Irish have done for the United States what no 
other race could have achieved. Martially and 
politically, also, they have rendered Celtic ser- 
vice. But they have complicated the foreign 
relations of the country in one important as- 
pect. They have kept and still keep England 
and America apart. By an overoptimistic 
estimate Lord Bryce wrote in September of 
1914 of Irish hostility: "It is now confined Wa 
comparatively small section and is likely soon 
to disappear. But from the end of the Civil 
War till about the end of the century it was 
an obstacle to perfectly good relations." As 
events have shown, a better estimate was made 
by J. F. Maguire, M. P., in 1867: "It may sub- 
side, so may the sea. But like the sea the first 
breath will set it again in motion, while a storm 
would lash it into fury. It may subside, but 
it is difficult to think how without some coun- 
teracting cause it can die out." 



AMERICA'S FAMILY GHOST 15 

Henceforth the ghost of Ireland sat at the 
American hearth to rise and wail like a watch- 
dog at any approach of the hereditary enemy, 
whether friendly or hostile. In the uttermost 
parts of the sea Ireland has risen again and 
again to baffle and perplex England. She has 
stood not merely geographically but politically 
between England and America. In the world's 
great changing time when alliances are shuffled 
like cards and the traditional emotions of peo- 
ples are thrown into new shapes, has not a 
time come for the reconsideration of the rela- 
tions affecting Ireland, England, and America ? 
As long ago as 1852 Seward declared: "The 
people of Ireland are affiliated to us as we are 
to the people of Great Britain. Surely there 
can be no offence given by a younger member 
in offering mediation between the elder breth- 
ren of the same family upon a point of differ- 
ence between them." Has not the time come 
for England to cry peace to her pursuing 
avenger? Is it not good for all that the un- 
forgiving ghost that haunts the common pur- 
pose of England and America should be laid? 
Does not the exorcism and the magical influ- 
ence which can lead to Ireland's healing, Eng- 
land's pardon, and America's comfort lie in 
the stupendous sentences by which America 



16 THE IRISH ISSUE 

made known to the world the unfurling of 
her flag over Armageddon? Is none great 
enough to banish the Banshee of the Atlantic ? 



II 

THE CENTENARY OF JOHN MITCHEL 

The centenary of John Mitchel has passed. 
Of all the surprises of the war the most curious 
piece of topsy-turvydom was enacted when the 
British Commission was received by the mayor 
of New York, the grandson of John Mitchel, 
Irish patriot and British felon. In political de- 
scent Mr. Balfour was but two places from Dis- 
raeli, the Tory leader, who prevented the head 
of the Mitchel family of two generations back 
from entering the House of Commons on the 
ground of his former conviction. 

John Mitchel was the most brilliant, the most 
downright, the most dreamshot of the patriots 
of forty-eight. Some may live by "the pathos 
of a pikehead," but Mitchel lives by his pen. 
Of all the literary mirrors which were held up 
to the terrible decade preceding the Irish fam- 
ine, his Jail Journal remains the most polished, 
the most reflective. He was the literary fore- 
runner of modern Irish nationalism, and after 
his escape from Australia he initiated those 

17 



18 THE IRISH ISSUE 

Irish-American relations which have lasted 
down to our own times with but slight modi- 
fication. 

"Nations have no future state," was his be- 
lief, and since they have no hope of immor- 
tality in the next world he required them to 
seek rebirth in this. Hence the "Young Ire- 
land" movement. It has found its record in 
two books, in MitchePs Journal and in his col- 
league Gavan Duffy's Young Ireland. Their 
centenaries have fallen within a few months of 
each other. By a playfulness of fate one be- 
came a prime minister in the country to which 
the other had been sent as a convict. 

Mitchel wrote under grim circumstance. As 
a partisan he felt an unholy hatred for his op- 
ponents and some sympathetic horror for his 
own plight, which was pitiable in all conscience. 
His writing is stuff that illuminates history as 
with gas flares. Not unlike the quivering bit- 
terness of Swift, his Journal is filled with the 
living utterance, the trampled spirit, the exul- 
tation and defiance of the dean, varied only 
with bursts of ironical philosophy. 

The history of Ireland in the forties has 
come down to us in a blur of broken enthusiasm 
and disheartened battlement. The Young Ire- 
land movement had dissipated itself with the 



CENTENARY OF JOHN MITCHEL 19 

fine frenzy due to its name. Thomas Davis 
had lived and died. Meagher, not yet an 
American general, had threatened the sword, 
which Thackeray had fixed as his eternal nick- 
name. The tragedy had been that O'Connell 
had died old, while Young Ireland had^ died 
young. The great iridescent bubble of O'Con- 
nell's oratory had been pricked by the sting of 
death. MitcheFs paper had been suppressed. 
Ireland had entered into the ghastly trance of 
famine. The whole nation from the heights of 
enthusiastic and aerial agitation had fallen into 
the depths of the valley of the shadow of death. 
Mitchel had seen it all with the cool eyes of an 
Ulsterman, and knowing the end was near, 
gave notice of armed resistance. The govern- 
ment gave him fourteen years to reconsider his 
decision, in prison. 

So the Journal came to be written, with its 
wistful but fierce recapitulation of events, 
forces, and characters, throwing a clear light 
upon the workings of that period of debacle. 
To Mitchel England was responsible for the 
whole misery, but O'Connell was no hero. A 
little sadly he had watched the great-souled 
Homeric mobs that had flocked to the monster 
meetings. He had foreseen that all was not 
well, though O'Connell's perorations had 



20 THE IRISH ISSUE 

swelled with his audiences. He was one of 
those who had striven to add some real fuel to 
the wind which O'Connell thought was suffi- 
cient to keep the smoking embers of nation- 
hood in a blaze. He differed a good deal from 
O'Connell as to how the liberation of Ireland 
should be achieved. Mitchel thought only of 
liberty. O'Connell not unnaturally thought 
of the "Liberator," as he was called. The 
youth of Ireland were swayed between repeal 
and revolution. It was the perennial Irish 
strife between the theorists of moral force and 
the abettors of physical force. "Tell me not of 
O'Connell's son," thundered the author of the 
Jail Journal; "his father begat him in moral 
force and in patience and perseverance his 
mother conceived him!" Mitchel possessed 
that gift of the terrible phrase which has always 
played havoc with Irish parties. When this 
same son of O'Connell visited Paris in 1848 and 
made some mild depreciation of the blood shed 
at the barricades, out spake Mitchel in the 
United Irishman: 

From amidst the sacred graves, where the soldiers of liberty 
sleep gloriously in their bloody shrouds and the hymns of vic- 
tory are chanted by a liberated nation, what craven canting 
drivel is this borne to our ears? It was not in Ireland's name 
that he sent round among the Parisians a dead man's hat, a 
posthumous begging box ! 



CENTENARY OF JOHN MITCHEL 21 

From his prison cell he wrote a passage of 
unique strength on the old man himself, that 
Irish writers dare not quote: 

Poor old Dan ! wonderful, mighty, jovial and mean old man ! 
with silver tongue and smile of witchery and heart of melting 
ruth ! lying tongue ! smile of treachery ! heart of unfathomable 
fraud ! What a royal yet vulgar soul ! with the keen eye and 
potent swoop of a generous eagle of Cairn Tual, with the base 
servility of a hound and the cold cruelty of a spider ! Think 
of his speech for John Magee, the most powerful forensic 
achievement since before Demosthenes and then think of the 
gorgeous and gossamer theory of moral and peaceful agitation. 
And after one has thought of all this and more, what then can 
a man say? what but pray that Irish earth may lie light on 
O'Connell's breast and that the good God who knew how to 
create so wondrous a creature may have mercy on his soul. 

Mitchel was unafraid to write strong stuff. 
He believed that O'Connell led the Irish "all 
wrong for forty years," that they had followed 
him into the wilderness of agitation after agi- 
tation, mistaking in their simplicity every oasis 
for the Promised Land. Rich and sparkling 
oratory was their manna. And the govern- 
ment watched, knowing that intoxication with 
words or with wine must be the prelude to a 
fall. Within a few years, indeed, there happed 
a fall such as few could have imagined, a fall 
in the population by two millions. After the 
happy hurrahing came the great famine, a 
story that is beyond the function of words. It 



22 THE IRISH ISSUE 

changed Irish history and, more serious still, it 
changed Irish character. Mitchel made the 
gruesome discovery that it changed even the 
Irish soil: 



Human bones considered merely as phosphate of lime, not 
counting the bones of famished dogs, to the amount of fifteen 
hundred thousand perfect skeletons, most of them not buried 
deep but judiciously scattered, with a slight covering of mould 
or even as top dressing, must have considerably mellowed and 
fattened the soil of Ireland within twelve months. 



The plight of the people was pitiful. Their 
enemies told them it was their own fault for 
agitating and they must wait. Their friends 
told them it was the fault of the government 
and they must wait. They waited, but famine 
and fever waited not. Official stupidity slew 
thousands, where the potato blight slew its 
hundreds. Relief in burlesque was introduced. 
Crowds were employed in uprooting hills and 
burying the debris in carefully prepared pits. 
Irish corn was exported and Indian meal 
fetched from the ends of the earth to take its 
place. The Archbishop of Canterbury sug- 
gested as a remedy a day of national prayer 
and fasting, which was certainly practicable. 
The viceroy at the time condemned "intra- 
mural" interments as unsanitary. MitchePs 



CENTENARY OF JOHN MITCHEL 23 

sarcasm was instant. s 'And you starveling 
people of Ireland, where do you bury your 
dead? For twelve months you have enjoyed 
the full benefits of extra-mural interment and 
in the open air, too!" 

Of the famine he left a weird but realistic 
description, which deserves literary remem- 
brance : 

Go where you would, in the heart of the town or in the 
suburb, on the mountain side, on the level plain, there was 
the stillness and heavy pall-like feel of the chamber of death. 
You stood in the presence of a dread, silent, vast dissolution. 
An unseen ruin was creeping around you. You saw no war 
of classes, no open janissary war of foreigners, no human 
agency of destruction. You could weep, but the rising curse 
died unspoken within your heart like a profanity. Human 
passion there was none but inhuman and unearthly quiet. 
Children met you toiling heavily on stone heaps, but their 
burning eyes were senseless, and their faces cramped and 
weazened like stunted old men. Gangs worked, but without 
a murmur or a whistle or a laugh, ghostly like voiceless shad- 
ows to the eye. Even womanhood had ceased to be womanly. 
The birds of the air carolled no more, and the crow and the 
raven dropped dead upon the wing. The very dogs, hairless 
with the head down and the vertebrae of the back protruding 
like a saw of bone, glared on you from the ditchside with a 
wolfish avid eye, and then slunk away scowling and cowardly. 
Nay, the sky of heaven, the blue mountains, the still lake, 
stretching far away westward, looked not as their wont. Be- 
tween them and you rose up a steaming agony, a film of suffer- 
ing, impervious and dim. It seemed as though the soul of 
the land was faint and dying, and that the faintness and the 
death had crept into all things of heaven and earth. 



24 THE IRISH ISSUE 

This was a sombre vignette of an event which 
Lord Brougham deplored as "surpassing any- 
thing in the pages of Thucydides, on the canvas 
of Poussin, in the dismal chant of Dante." 

During the short run of his paper he literally 
set the currents and ideals of Irish nationalism 
as they were to move Irishmen until the rise of 
Sinn Fein. His appreciation of the land ques- 
tion was succinct: 

Land in Ireland is life. Just in the proportion that our 
people contrive to keep or to gain some foothold on the soil, in 
that proportion exactly they will live and not die. Ireland for 
the Irish means primarily and mainly not Irishmen for Irish 
offices, it means Irishmen fixed upon Irish ground and grow- 
ing there, occupying the island like trees in a living forest. 

While the phrases of his white-heat hate have 
passed into a coinage, which is current to this 
day, it must not be forgotten that he had a 
constructive programme and that he urged Na- 
tionalist unity with the Ulster, out of which 
his own soul had been digged, and even with 
the people as distinct from the government of 
England. It is true he issued that terrible 
saying that, if he could, he would pour coals of 
fire on the heads of the enemies of his country, 
a saying that is recorded on a public monu- 
ment in Cork. It was true he avenged himself 



CENTENARY OF JOHN MITCHEL 25 

when carried from penal station to penal sta- 
tion, from Bermuda to the Cape, from the 
Cape to Van Diemen's Land, by saying that 
on British felony the sun never set ! True that 
he fiercely prayed that whatever disgrace Eng- 
lish law might inflict upon him it might remain 
upon his head and upon the head of his chil- 
dren, but his hatred of England was exceeded 
by his love of Ireland. Of that love of Ireland 
there are pathetic instances in the Jail Journal, 
as when he wrote from Bermuda: 

Well known to me by day and by night are the voices of 
Ireland; winds and waters, the faces of her ancient mountains. 
I see it, I hear it all, for by the wondrous power of imagination, 
informed by strong love, I do indeed live more truly in Ireland 
than on these unblessed rocks. 

And no one wrote more pitifully of the Irish 
dispersion than Mitchel, as he found himself 
on one of the very convict ships: 

They were born, these men to a heritage of unquenched hun- 
ger, amongst the teeming plenty of their mother land, hunted 
like noxious beasts from all shelter on her hospitable bosom, 
driven to stay their gnawing hunger enemy with what certain 
respectable men call their property. And so now they are 
traversing the deep under bayonet points, to be shot out like 
rubbish on a bare foreign strand, and told to seek their for- 
tune there amongst a people whose very language they know 
not. They hardly know what troops of fell foes, with quivers 
full of arrows, are hunting for their young souls and bodies, 



26 THE IRISH ISSUE 

they hardly know and so much the more pity for them they 
hardly feel it. But in poor frail huts on many an Irish hill- 
side, their fathers and mothers dwell with poverty and labor 
and sorrow and mourn for their lost children with a mourning 
that will know no comfort till they are gathered to their people 
in the chapel yard. For indeed these convict boys were not 
born of the rock or the oaktree, human mothers bore them, 
sang them asleep in lowly cradles, wept and prayed for them. 

But they were not only peasants whom he 
met in the felon field. If Mitchel had been the 
Robespierre of the movement, Smith O'Brien 
had been reckoned an Irish Lafayette. He had 
been sentenced to death and then to penal ser- 
vitude, for the law made no difference between 
Gael and Gall, between republican and aristo- 
crat. Mitchel met him in the Antipodes and 
made some amends for the ungenerous mirth 
of Thackeray in a passage which will outlive 
even the statue which Ireland gave O'Brien in 
Dublin : 

It is sad to look upon this noblest of Irishmen, thrust in 
here among the offscourings of England's jails, with his home 
desolated, and his hopes ruined, and his defeated life falling 
into the sere and yellow leaf. He is fifty years of age, yet has 
all the high and intense pleasure of youth in these majestic 
hills and woods, softened indeed and made pensive by sorrow 
and haunted by the ghosts of buried hopes. He is a rare and 
noble sight to see, a man who cannot be crushed, bowed or 
broken, who can stand firm on his own feet against all the 
tumult and tempest of this ruffianly world, with his bold brow 



CENTENARY OF JOHN MITCHEL 27 

fronting the sun like any other Titan, son of Coelus and Terra, 
anchored immovably upon his own brave heart within, his 
clear eye and soul open as ever to all the melodies and splen- 
dours of earth and heaven and calmly waiting for the angel 
death. 

So wrote the grandfather of Mayor Mitchel 
of the relative of Sir Cecil Spring-Rice. 

Some of MitchePs political writings are so 
scarce that he is worthy of quotation. The 
relation of Ulster to America and to rebellion 
and its whole history he slipped into one para- 
graph : 

For a long time the notion of a Protestant Republic in Ire- 
land had prevailed among the sturdy spawn of the old Cov- 
enant in the North, dreamily rather than in expressed intent. 
The Presbyterian religion, the memories of Scotch strife, the 
independent enterprise which impelled the settlers to Down 
and Antrim two centuries before, and won for them by their 
right arms broad lands and walled towns by the sea, continued 
to guide and influence the Northernmen. Since they held 
Ulster against James, the philosophy of Locke filtered through 
Molyneux and Lucas and every orator and writer of that whole 
century reminded them of the liberty for which they had 
fought and which they had not. The struggle in America re- 
called the old dream of the Protestant Republic. The aris- 
tocracy driven into the combat aided the Ulster Presbyterians, 
until by finesse and fine talk and fanfaronade they got Ireland 
into their hands constitutionally. Then liberty was cushioned. 

In a famous passage Mitchel ridiculed the 
Ulstermen for the manner in which they had 



28 THE IRISH ISSUE 

allowed themselves to be sidetracked from 
their old ideals of liberty into religious an- 
tipathy : 

How much of the linen do you, who weave it, get to wear ? 
How much of the corn do you, who sow and reap it, get to 
eat ? Where does it go ? Who eats and wears what you 
make? Ahf perhaps it is the Pope of Rome who swindles 
you in this fashion? The Pope we know is the Man of Sin 
and the Mystery of Iniquity and all that, but he brings no 
ejectments in Ireland ! 

Against the strong and the oppressor Mitch- 
el's fearless pen was wielded in the day of Ire- 
land's greatest need and when her voice was 
hushed his rose in crescendo on her behalf. 
Carlyle wrote few passages so telling as this 
attack on the viceregal festivities: 

In the light of that mock throne on the hill over the Liffey 
there vibrate now all the dizened atomies of happy Ireland. 
Glittering Captains, silvered Lieutenants, epauletted puppy- 
ism in every grade and phase and fashion, wigged debasement 
fresh from a public hanging and gowned simony flock around 
delighted at "the flourishing condition of the state." No 
whisper of death, no shadow of desolation breaks over the 
crowd . . . and so begins a third year of uninterrupted 
famine. 

Nevertheless he never allowed himself to lose 
sight of the proper relations which should sub- 
sist between England and Ireland under proper 



CENTENARY OF JOHN MITCHEL 29 

conditions. Crying off all hatred between the 
working people of the two countries, he sug- 
gested with profound political philosophy: 

Already the two long-slumbering nations have recognised 
each other and seen where their help lies. Why may not an 
alliance be then and there struck, strictly defining our common 
purposes and pointing out where our roads diverge and at what 
point the British and Irish nations are to wend their several 
roads, parting in peace, if it be possible, and fulfil their own 
destinies in the coming ages. 

"If it be possible" has become not only a 
local but an international question to-day. It 
was the testament Mitchel left with Ireland, 
for after his escape from penalism he was hence- 
forth to be absorbed in the wider problems of 
the world. As he drew near to the coasts of 
free America, rumours of wars involving Eng- 
land with Russia reached him, and he wrote: 

"Czar, I bless thee, I kiss the hem of thy 
garment, I drink to thy health and longevity. 
Give us war in our time, O Lord !" They were 
strange words for a Republican preparing for 
American citizenship to utter, but Mitchel was 
an Irish Republican ! His petition for war was 
fulfilled and two of his sons fell in the cause of 
the Confederacy. He could not help being on 
the losing side. After the Civil War he took 
up the cause of France as fiercely as he had 



30 THE IRISH ISSUE 

upheld that of Ireland and who of his old ene- 
mies would hold him wrong to-day? From 
New York in the Irish Citizen he sounded the 
top note of anger and warning in 1870: 

We take part instantly, frankly and zealously for France. 
France has here the just cause. Everyone who has read the 
history of the false House of Hohenzollern, whether in the 
pages of their partisan Carlyle or anywhere else, must have 
got an idea of the insatiable ambition and utterly desperate 
treachery of that royal house. No family of professional bur- 
glars, the burglar father training up the burglar son, has ever 
been so unrelentingly bent upon living on the plunder of the 
others, and coming by that plunder through all possible and 
conceivable lies, frauds and violence as this brood of Hohen- 
zollern. 

As far back as 1866 he had foreseen and 
accurately defined the idea of Pan- Germanism: 
'The idea that the Teutonic nationality is to 
be unified and bound together in one mighty 
mass so as to become predominant and irresis- 
tible in Europe." 

The statesmen of Anglo-Saxondom would 
have saved themselves a great deal of trouble 
if they had studied MitchePs writings in those 
far-off days. It was not any Celtic seership 
so much as downright Republican rage which 
led him to proclaim in 1870: 

The Prussian policy is to prepare very actively in secret 
for some unjustifiable aggression, to affect friendship till the 



CENTENARY OF JOHN MITCHEL 31 

last moment, to employ military and engineering spies on an 
immense scale, to affect innocence and unconsciousness, if 
taxed with these tricks and at last when the moment has 
arrived, to burst in with overwhelming force. 

It was nearly fifty years later before the rest 
of the English-speaking world began very sol- 
emnly to discover and disinter the Prussian 
policy as a sudden and woful plot against man- 
kind. How brilliant Mitchel could be in his 
political diagnosis is shown in the most ac- 
curate prediction perhaps ever made. In the 
Irish Citizen for October 1, 1870, he wrote: 

Prussia cannot be England's friend. Prussia has her own 
aspirations and ambitions. One of them is to be a great mari- 
time power, or rather the great maritime power of Europe, and 
nothing in the future can be more sure than that Prussia, if 
successful finally in this struggle with France will take Bel- 
gium and threaten from Antwerp the mouth of the Thames. 

But neither in his own country or in any 
other country was John Mitchel reckoned a 
prophet. Patriot and visionary ? Yes. But 
how clear-sighted he was he could not have 
known himself. 

In America he planted the philosophy of 
Fenianism, which sprang up to distort and 
occasionally convulse Anglo-American relations 
until the approach of home rule induced the 
dawn of constitutionalism and the dream of 



32 THE IRISH ISSUE 

reconciliation, both of which he had no less 
foreseen. Having sowed the dragon's teeth for 
England in the New World he returned to take 
his rest in Ireland, "under the globe of silver 
that hangs between the branches of the laurels 
in Dromolane." He could be indifferent to his 
exclusion from the House of Commons, even 
though his wildest guess into the future would 
hardly have revealed to him the sight of his 
grandson accepting the amende honorable from 
a suppliant prime minister of England on the 
steps of the City Hall of New York! 



Ill 

THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 

It is now a quarter of a century since Parnell 
died. During the nineteenth century he was 
the most meteoric figure in Irish life, though he 
had nothing meteoric in himself except a cer- 
tain stoniness. But if there are men of des- 
tiny, Parnell was of them. Cold, purposeful, 
unrelenting, distrustful, fatalistic, he was born 
at the time of the great famine, in Ireland's 
hour of fate, and he perished in his own. 

Parnell for about ten years was the history 
of Ireland. He was neither a Celt nor an ora- 
tor nor a Catholic. Like Dean Swift, he was 
an Anglo-Irishman driven by his savage indig- 
nation into revolt. He was brought up in the 
semi-feudal position of the class to whom it 
was a duty rather to spend than defend the 
resources of their country. At the University 
of Cambridge he imbibed an interest in higher 
mathematics and a certain ability for cricket. 
Unfortunately he was rusticated as the result 
of a street row. Tradition used to point out a 

33 



34 THE IRISH ISSUE 

spot in Station Road, where the Saxon insulted 
him as he brooded over the wrongs of Ireland 
and was rolled in the dust. As a matter of 
fact, he had not begun to think as yet of any 
rights or wrongs in connection with Ireland. 
He was too proud to return to residence and 
forfeited his chance of a degree. In virtue of 
his squiredom he entered the militia and be- 
came high sheriff of Wicklow. 

He only became a Nationalist quietly and 
deliberately. When three honest conspirators 
were hung in Manchester for the accidental 
death of a policeman, the determination was 
precipitated in his mind. In an hour pregnant 
with issue he chose the up-hill task of marshal- 
ling the broken forces of Irish democracy 
against his own all-powerful class. He was 
unsuccessful when he stood for Dublin, but was 
elected for Meath. His election followed a 
curious succession. John Mitchel had returned 
home to take his seat in Parliament, but was 
disqualified as a felon and died soon after. 
John Martin caught cold at his funeral and 
died, too. Parnell succeeded to his seat. 

Parnell entered Parliament with no reputa- 
tion save for good looks and inefficient speech. 
The Parliament that he entered was still a 
little-changed pillar of the Constitution, as far 



THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 35 

as Ireland was concerned a buttress of con- 
servative opinion, the shrine of precedent and 
procedure. Only a moneyed or aristocratic 
class could breathe its atmosphere. The House 
was divided into two traditional groups but not 
against herself. If an uncertain amount of 
Irish insurgency simmered above the surface 
at times, both parties combined under an un- 
written law for its suppression. It was before 
the day of Labour or of real Liberal, when 
Whig and Tory played the game after their 
own heart. Under a fixed code of banter and 
debate the time-honoured ball of business was 
kept rolling across the gangways. At election 
times they merely relieved each other of the 
combined sweet and sweat of office. Democ- 
racy was unknown. 

The Irish secretary at the time was James 
Lowther, who had no qualification except a 
knowledge of horse-racing. His appointment 
was laid to Disraeli's cynical humour. Low- 
ther once told a deputation of peasants that 
they needed grass-seed rather than potato- 
seed, like the French minister who recom- 
mended the poor to eat grass. In each case a 
revolution was under way. 

Ireland was largely represented by Whigs, 
a perennial type of politicians who combine the 



3d THE IRISH ISSUE 

respectable with the despicable. The type, 
which from all time has been intelligent enough 
to realise what was just, but small-minded 
enough to prefer what was profitable. It was 
said with a bitter truth that Pilate was a Whig. 
But the Irish leader was a genuine and warm- 
hearted man. Isaac Butt had sacrificed a great 
legal career in order to rally the country to a 
constitutional policy. Though he had O'Don- 
nell blood and possessed "a Donegal temper," 
he was a curious compromise in many ways. 
He was a Protestant and yet he wore Catholic 
scapulars. He loved and reverenced the law, 
but he loved and defended the Fenians. He 
had been a Unionist orator in O'ConnelFs time, 
but he invented home rule. For some years 
he had marshalled a pacific party at West- 
minster, where every proposed amelioration 
fell between the two dominant parties of tra- 
dition. His complacent failure had disheart- 
ened the Irish and made Parnell's leadership 
the more necessary. Butt was the first to 
recognise that Parriell would prove "an ugly 
customer for the Saxon." 

By a coincidence the night Parnell took his 
seat Mr. Biggar endeavoured to retard coercion 
by speaking for four consecutive hours. This 
was regarded as against all the rules of the 



THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 37 

game, but it gave Parnell an idea of the policy, 
which is called obstruction by those who are 
obstructed, and the active policy by those who 
are primarily active. Biggar experimented, 
but Parnell took out its patent. The rules 
were simple and four in number. To work in 
government time. To aid anybody to spend 
government time. Whenever a bill was 
sighted to block it. Whenever a raw was 
noticed to rub it. 

Parnell settled down to play the gentlemanly 
game of politics remorselessly. The well-bred 
House stared and protested in vain as two men 
set out to thwart and menace the business of 
six hundred. If the government was unwilling 
to attend to Irish business, the Irish members 
paid unwelcome attention to government busi- 
ness. 

Parnell faced the English like an Englishman. 
He showed himself more of a tenacious British 
bulldog than a long-winded Irish wolfhound. 
He outdid them in political cynicism. He 
outbowed them in frigid courtesy. He knew 
exactly how far he could go. He could gauge 
the temper of the House to the clause and to 
the minute. His band increased from five to 
thirty. Their rough apprenticeship was in- 
spired by his master-personality. 



38 THE IRISH ISSUE 

During bitter years they fought the battle 
of democracy against friend and foe. They 
had no pity for the well-meaning Butt, whom 
they turned down broken-hearted to his grave. 
They spoke in season and out of season. They 
spoke neither in vanity nor in vain, not to elicit 
applause but deliberately to rouse indignation. 
Parnell instructed them to learn the laws of the 
House by breaking them. To the science of 
perpetual 'motion" they added that of un- 
ceasing speech. They learnt to resist equally 
the dictates of fear and bullying, the advances 
of flattery and blandishment. Day and night 
they relieved each other on the political fence, 
where neither party could touch them. At last 
the House surrendered and the Irish question 
became a serious legacy from one ministry to 
another. Hitherto the Irish attack had been 
innocuous and the Irish member went clad 
with derision. ParnelPs policy was "not rec- 
onciliation but retaliation," and Parnellism 
began to loom as a force requiring calculation 
in political arithmetic. In one stormy decade 
he had faced the system of genteel fraud and 
collusion as practised under the cloak of the 
Mother of Parliaments and reduced her to the 
plainer-speaking and more democratic creature 
of to-day. Through the breach which Parnell 



THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 89 

hewed in her walls entered not only the Irish 
party but later the English Labour party as 
well. 

Parnell did not spare his followers or himself. 
Under the strife and strain his character began 
to harden to a texture of steel and marble, but, 
like steel or marble in their plastic shape, he 
had to pass through an ordeal as fierce as fire. 
Justin McCarthy describes one of his appear- 
ances in later years: 

Appeared is a fitting word to use, for no apparition, no 
ghost from the grave ever looked more startling among living 
men, the ghastly face, the wasted form, the glassy eyes gleam- 
ing, looking like the terrible corpse-candles of Welsh supersti- 
tion. If ever death shone in a face it shone in that. 

What were his means and ways ? His state- 
craft consisted in fitting the axe head of physi- 
cal force to the handle of moral suasion after 
each policy had apparently failed separately. 
Out of both he forged his weapon. In West- 
minster he was a political reformer, but the 
eyes and sometimes the sympathy of the 
American Clan-na-Gael were with him. Dav- 
itt says the extremists in Ireland opposed him, 
while those in America secretly favoured him. 
How dangerous a game he played was shown 
in the fact that after the Phcenix Park mur- 



40 THE IRISH ISSUE 

ders, which he denounced, he needed police 
protection from both English and Irish parti- 
sans. His game was deep but not desperate. 
He played politics as he played chess. Queen, 
bishops, castle, pawns were all on his Irish 
board. 

The secret of his rule was never clear. His 
devoted followers spoke of his iron hand, but 
few of them had ever felt it. He avoided rather 
than punished them. He ruled by mystery 
more than by mastery. He fascinated rather 
than forced the Celtic people into regarding 
him as their indispensable leader. In one army 
he arrayed priest and peasant, dynamiter and 
devotee. His rank and file contained both 
Fenian and O'Connellite. He knew exactly 
how far he could go. Between arms and sub- 
mission there seemed to be no alternative. An 
unwise agitator would have appealed to vio- 
lence to back his arguments. Parnell forbade 
violence but also any dealing with agent or 
bailiff. He added the word boycotting to 
European dictionaries. By a master-stroke he 
revived mediaeval excommunication to serve 
modern democracy. He defied the law by 
keeping within the letter and outraging the 
spirit. 

He soon found himself face to face with 



THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 41 

Gladstone and Forster, Gladstone's chief sec- 
retary. Gladstone described Parnell as stand- 
ing between the living and the dead, "not like 
Aaron to stay but to spread the plague." Par- 
nell replied, calling Gladstone "a masquerad- 
ing knight-errant, ready to champion the rights 
of every nation but Ireland." Gladstone had 
no better repartee except to send Parnell to 
gaol. Forster received from Parnell the undy- 
ing epithet of "Buckshot," which he had or- 
dered the troops to use instead of bullets when 
firing on the unarmed crowd. Forster was a 
Quaker philanthropist let loose on Ireland, who 
believed that to spare coercion was to spoil the 
nation. Coercion not unnaturally produced 
the very crimes it was expected to suppress. 
Parnell was placed in Kilmainham without 
trial. When his strong hand was removed, the 
chariot of Ireland was dragged under the storm. 
The countryside hailed outrages and the land- 
lords replied with a rain of evictions. Out of 
the chaos Parnell managed to wrest the Kil- 
mainham Treaty. He was willing to slow 
down the agitation, but his price was the aban- 
donment of Forster and of the rents in arrears. 
It was a compromise which the revolutionists 
regretted, but Parnell was always ready to 
accept a step to constitutionalism. He told 



42 THE IRISH ISSUE 

Davitt that prison solitude would drive him 
mad. He had felt strong enough to negotiate 
the treaty without consulting any others. He 
knew, much as he disliked prison, that it con- 
firmed power extraordinary upon him. In his 
pregnant way he remarked that his release lay 
with the people, and by this time they had 
learnt to take him at his word. They made 
the rule of the country impossible and the gov- 
ernment had no choice. Had Parnell remained 
in prison, their surrender would have been 
even more complete, but Parnell did not enjoy 
captivity as his followers did. He felt it as 
an affront to his dignity. He never forgave 
Gladstone, whom he privately called the Grand 
Old Spider. 

He left Kilmainham with the Irish settle- 
ment at hand, but in one insane hour all was 
undone. Forster's successor arrived as an 
emissary of peace and was murdered by the 
Invincibles in the Phcenix Park. The killing 
of Cavendish was accidental to the stabbing of 
the Under-Secretary Burke. In the political 
sense Parnell was not less stabbed in the back. 
He made the offer to Gladstone to abandon 
politics entirely rather than impede the com- 
ing reforms. 

The tragedy changed Irish history. Though 



THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 43 

many details have never been known, there 
was a grim sequence. Years previously, when 
John Boyle O'Reilly was shipped as a convict, 
word was passed to him on the ship that Carey 
had done for the informer who had betrayed 
him. Carey in turn became the informer 
against the Phoenix Park murderers. But 
when he took ship with a free pardon he was 
shot by a fellow passenger on reaching South 
Africa. But there was nobility amid the 
horror. One of those executed refused to for- 
give Carey before he died, until he heard that 
the sister of charity who had tended him and 
entreated him to do so was a cousin of Burke, 
whom he had murdered. Very sublime was 
the utterance of Lord Frederic Cavendish's 
widow to Gladstone: 'You did well to send 
him." Though Gladstone was one day to 
drive Parnell out of public life, he behaved 
with magnanimity this time in bidding him 
stay. 

As a result of the crimes Forster enjoyed a 
keen revenge, for he was able to show in his 
speech before the House that his policy had 
some reason. Under the insinuations of com- 
plicity Parnell sat unmoved. Never had he 
appeared more incomprehensible to English- 
men, more magnificent to his subjects. Ste- 



44 THE IRISH ISSUE 

venson has described in The Dynamiter how 
"Parnell sits before posterity silent, Mr. For- 
ster's appeal echoing down the centuries." 
Posterity, however, has learnt the reason of 
that silence more eloquent than Forster's phil- 
ippic. It was the silence of contempt. When 
later he did speak, with the Prince of Wales 
and Cardinal Manning in the gallery, it was 
to refuse to consider himself amenable to Eng- 
lish opinion. To the Irish only would he 
answer and by them he was prepared to stand 
or fall. 

In Ireland he was justified enthusiastically 
and he began to be known as the "uncrowned 
king," a title which he strangely shares with 
Confucius. Never was a politician so feared or 
hated, or watched by more vigilant enemies. 
Vested interests, cabinets, newspapers, all the 
powers of this world conspired to defeat this 
solitary man, who continued his way extorting 
the liberties of Ireland. Only one power there 
was in Ireland greater than his or able to crush 
him, but that was no power temporal. 

Supporters and lieutenants he had in legion, 
but he had realised early that it is sometimes 
easier to meet one's enemies than to escape 
from one's friends. He had also discovered 
that a public man need not have enemies un- 



THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 45 

less he deigns to notice them. Bosom friends 
he had none. His followers found themselves 
subject to an influence rather than to a disci- 
pline. He treated them with such aloofness 
that at times the Irish "whips" had to dis- 
cover from others when he intended to speak. 
He often failed to take part in divisions to 
which members had been fetched by telegram 
in his name. For the first time the govern- 
ment found themselves dealing with a foreign 
power. He always bargained on the supposi- 
tion that he had nothing to give and everything 
to gain. Several ministers grew old and grey 
doing business on such one-sided terms. Friend 
and foe he confronted with a pliant impene- 
trability. In dealing with a crisis, he shared 
with all successful generals and firemen the 
gift of instant realisation. He was fortunate 
in being enrolled under no party tradition, 
least of all his own. He allowed his party to 
discuss a political matter, but he would sud- 
denly appear and make a decisive utterance. 
He used to say Washington would be a highly 
unpopular leader in Ireland. 

His style of speech in the House was terse 
and pointed. Gladstone said he was able to 
do what all speakers are supposed to, but which 
few really do, say what they mean to say. 



46 THE IRISH ISSUE 

He also had the rarer power, which was not 
among Gladstone's gifts, of saying as little as 
he started out to say. Concentration stood 
him in the place of oratory. He wasted no 
time on perorations. His campaign statements 
combined the brevity of cablegrams with some 
of the fire of a minor prophet. His statement 
that "no man has the right to set the bounds 
of a nation" was one of these, and it is written 
in bronze across his granite statue in Dublin 
to-day. 

As a free-lance he would have proved for- 
midable, but as the leader of eighty he was a 
deciding factor. The new franchise had given 
him the entry into Ulster. With the balance 
of power in his hand he tempted the irreproach- 
able Tories and they fell, but it was the Lib- 
erals who fell from office. If he put his ene- 
mies into power, it was for the same reason 
that a poor man stuffs a broken window with 
rags, not so much to let the light in as to keep 
the cold out. The Tories being only human 
accepted the new situation. There is a pro- 
phetic passage in Swift's Journal concerning 
Thomas Parnell, his poetic ancestor, which is 
worth quoting: "Oxford passed through the 
crowd of his suitors to welcome Parnell when 
he deserted the Whigs." Tory leaders did the 



THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 47 

same in the nineteenth century. Salisbury 
made an academic defence of boycotting. 
Churchill denounced the application of coer- 
cion to a sensitive people. Lord Carnarvon 
hinted at home rule during an interview with 
Parnell in an empty house. 

On the other hand, the Liberals awaited the 
first chance to make terms, but Parnell insisted 
on an unconditional surrender to home rule. 
There was a grim pause and Gladstone, after 
due deliberation, announced himself a Home 
Ruler. The two mightiest swordsmen in the 
parliamentary duel had met. Parnell did not 
possess the eloquence or learning of the other, 
but he had weapons of his own. His dogged 
will power had made the Tories set the pace 
for Gladstone. In relation to Gladstone he 
had repeated St. Paul's achievement and con- 
verted his gaoler. It was Parnell's supreme 
success in politics. He had made home rule 
inevitable. 

The first Home Rule Bill was defeated. The 
Tories returned to office and celebrated the 
Queen's Jubilee with a Coercion Act in Ireland. 
Led away by the general exuberance, The 
Times published letters purporting to connect 
Parnell with the Phoenix Park murders. Par- 
nell declined to prosecute, for he did not care 



48 THE IRISH ISSUE 

to trust his reputation to an English jury. He 
despised the press but the press did not despise 
him. With a forged letter they had stabbed 
the man they feared. 

A royal commission was appointed by his 
political enemies, who sifted the lives of the 
Irish members as well as the whole Irish move- 
ment as though in the vice of an Inquisition. 
But the plot recoiled, for the letters proved 
forgeries and the forger committed suicide. 
Before the acquitting board of judges Parnell 
sat as unmoved indeed as though they had 
found him guilty ! To their verdict he was so 
indifferent that it was with difficulty that his 
counsel could induce him always to attend. 
But the political and artistic world flocked to 
witness the drama. Some sketches from Miss 
Wellord's Memories are worth quoting. Of 
Piggott the forger: 

Shall I ever forget his face? Despair, griin, awful despair 
had settled down upon it. A livid hue had overspread every 
feature, the veins on the forehead were swollen almost to 
bursting and the nostrils rose and fell with every respiration. 
When he tried to speak he could with difficulty articulate. 

Mr. Parnell had a wonderful face, the face of a fanatic. 
There was a dreamy beauty, pathos, mingled strength and 
weakness in it, there was also an underlying persuasive melan- 
choly. And he looked ill. His very tall spare form drooped. 



THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 49 

while nervous agitation was visible in a variety of spasmodic 
movements, indeed it was so obvious that he was suffering 
physically as well as mentally that the presiding judge more 
than once said kindly, "If you are fatigued, Mr. Parnell, pray 
be seated." "I thank your Lordship, not at all," replied Par- 
nell, but he had to grasp the rail in front to steady himself. 



He took no favours. 

Another interested witness was Burne- Jones. 
As the sunlight for a while fell on Parnell's 
haggard and bearded face he could not help 
noting to Meredith that he had seen a wonder- 
ful model for the judgment scene enacted once 
before Pontius Pilate. 

The summing of the commission was made 
as condemnatory of the Irish party as possible, 
but the main accusation against Parnell was 
held false. It was as great a triumph as is per- 
mitted to a statesman once in his lifetime. 
From Ireland arose but one cry, Vivat Rex! 
When he entered the House of Commons, all 
parties rose from their seats to atone for the 
terrible wrong that had been done to him, all 
except Lord Hartington, the brother of the 
victim of the Phoenix Park. It was an amaz- 
ing scene, but Parnell made no acknowledg- 
ment of the ovation. Sardonically he told Mr. 
Harrington that he knew they would have pre- 
ferred to find him guilty. 



50 THE IRISH ISSUE 

It was Parnell's apotheosis. Up to that 
time none had done battle with him and come 
away unscathed. From behind his prison bars 
he had broken Forster. He had converted 
Gladstone. He had pinned Carnarvon. The 
Times lay in rags. The Tories could only 
groan in impotence. Every political party ac- 
knowledged him as a master. Even so, unsus- 
pected ruin lay in his path. Who could have 
foreseen the utter and blighting calamity which 
awaited him so instantly? 

In a grey hour for Ireland Captain O'Shea 
instituted a divorce suit, naming Parnell. 
Why it was brought then has never been ex- 
plained, for Parnell and O'Shea had had the 
matter out some years before. O'Shea had 
not been ignorant, but he had accepted the 
Galway seat from Parnell in the teeth of the 
Irish party. Sir George Lewis pressed him to 
defend the suit, as he believed collusion could 
easily be proved. Parnell assented, but re- 
turned the next day to say that his first duty 
must be to the lady. There was no legal de- 
fence, though there might have been. Of 
moral defence there could be none. Balzac 
says that love is the fool's one chance to rise 
superior to himself. Unfortunately it is also 
the great man's only loophole to lower himself. 



THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 51 

Parnell's morals were irregular, but not sen- 
sual. An unhappy, lonely man, he found a 
companion and a mother rather than a mistress 
in Mrs. O'Shea. She became as essential to 
his balance as to his happiness. Chivalry 
rather than passion dictated his course during 
and after the divorce case. 

The sequel was the greatest split that has 
ever divided even an easily divided nation. 
For a while his party bade him hold the wheel. 
But later they echoed Gladstone's virtual let- 
ter of deposition and thrust him from the lead- 
ership. Then it was that he defied them, not 
so much out of mortified pride as because his 
party had accepted an English word of com- 
mand. He became a giant at bay. The com- 
mission had revealed every word and act of 
his public life. In the hateful campaign which 
followed the divorce every scrap of his private 
life, every shadow of love that he had ever 
known was pitilessly nailed to a thousand 
platforms. The Irish electorate staggered into 
suicidal conflict, dividing towns, parishes, and 
families. The party which Parnell had created 
tried their creator. The trial of Charles Stew- 
art Parnell by his subjects in Westminster was 
the most dramatic since King Charles was tried 
there by his. In each case the sentence was 



52 THE IRISH ISSUE 

one of deposition and eventually of death. 
Parnell was offered good terms but he refused 
them. Word for his destruction was first 
whispered from England, but it was his fellow 
countrymen who carried it out. 

It is idle to pretend that Gladstone was un- 
willing to see Parnell's fall, as soon as he real- 
ised that his own politics were liable to be 
compromised. What he never expected was 
that he would be overthrown by his own party. 
It must have soothed many an old sore of his 
to find he had dictated Parnell's doom. Swin- 
burne had once sung, "Parnell spurs his Glad- 
stone well," and doubtless the old man remem- 
bered past galling. Parnell was girded with 
his foes. All but a handful of his party for- 
sook him. The church swelled his disaster. 
Even the students in Maynooth turned his 
photographs to the wall. The parochial clergy 
followed Gladstone's political lead better than 
they had followed the Pope's. When Rome 
had forbidden the tribute subscribed in favour 
of the chief by a brief "Qualecumque de Par- 
nellio," the faithful to whom it was addressed 
turned Peter's pence for that year into Par- 
nell's pounds. 

The church has a long memory, and Par- 
nell's occasional trips into red radicalism had 



THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 53 

been noted. With some of his followers he 
had voted for the blasphemous Bradlaugh, 
and to please Dilke and Chamberlain he had 
used Irish votes to block the body of the 
prince imperial from Westminster Abbey. 
The clergy refused to condone a private fault 
in a public man. Criticism is unadjustable. 
The priests thought they were right and Par- 
nell did not think he was wrong. Had he had 
any knowledge of the old books of Ireland he 
might have remembered a destruction of roy- 
alty such as his, when the Celtic saints lay 
Tara desolate. As they rang their bells and 
chanted their curses, the unhappy King Der- 
mot cried out bitterly: 

Woe to him that to the Clergy of the Churches sheweth 
fight, woe to him that would contend with them, giving cut 
for cut. 

But he had little knowledge of Irish books 
or poets. Even Moore he had quoted but 
once, and then wrong. 

Only in the religious orders were any clerical 
supporters of Parnell to be found, and they 
gave their help by stealth. Ireland split into 
warring factions, leaving enough Parnellites to 
put up a fierce but losing fight. Ulster re- 
mained aloof and triumphant, privately sym- 



54 THE IRISH ISSUE 

pathising with ParnelL When he saw that his 
star of destiny was sinking he became careless. 
Travelling to and fro between England and 
Ireland, he fought election after election. He 
endangered his health and ate away his heart. 
In bitterness he told his deserting followers to 
sell him, if they must, but to sell him for a price. 
But angry Celts cannot see clear enough to 
drive bargains and they sold him for nought. 
The Scotch at least had cleared a historical 
groat when they sold their Charles Stewart to 
the ancestors of these same Puritans. In Octo- 
ber, 1891, the month he always associated with 
his destiny, he returned to England and died 
in the arms of the woman he loved. To make 
her his wife he had laid down both life and 
kingdom. The late Lord Morris, a grim old 
Catholic Unionist, remarked that since Joan 
of Arc, Mrt, Parnell was the only woman who 
had ever saved her country. 

There followed a gloomy apotheosis. A 
faithful few brought back his body across the 
Irish Sea. There was a dramatic landing in 
Ireland, as mournful angry men tore the outer 
casing of his coffin to pieces for relics. He lay 
in state in the City Hall of Dublin and was 
borne by an immense wailing crowd to the 
Catholic Valhalla of Glasnevin. They had 



THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 55 

killed him, but they gave him a wonderful 
funeral, did the Irish people. Parnell ' had 
perished, to use a phrase of the Irish mediae val- 
ists, by the "envenomed spittle of men." 

When it was too late, it was remembered 
that he was irreplaceable. His name became 
a symbol and a shibboleth, and his statue by 
St. Gaudens was later added to the monuments 
of Dublin. One by one his scattered followers 
came together with the years and recommenced 
the warfare in which he had first instructed 
them, and by long weary roads came again 
within sight of the promised land, to which his 
sceptreless hand still pointed from the grave. 

ParnelPs character has remained something 
of a paradox. Though his heart was finally 
torn in twain its secrets were never read. His 
natural sensitiveness he crushed out in order to 
present a harder front to the foe* Friend no 
less complained of his iciness. He could be 
gracious to supporters and dependents, when 
he wished, but his uneasy leadership forbade 
him to be overkind or intimate. In 1885 Jus- 
tin McCarthy wrote of him: 

"I don't know how it is, but he has in his 
manners as a host the sweetness of a woman 
as well as the strength of a curiously cold, self- 
contained masculine nature." 



56 THE IRISH ISSUE 

And in the following year: "One of our men 
complained to me of his manner; said that he 
was growing terribly dictatorial. The fact is 
that Parnell is nervously afraid of anything 
being done just now which might give our 
enemies the slightest chance of handle against 
him, and he is quite right." 

He was not Irish enough to be magnanimous 
like Butt on the one hand, or treacherous on 
the other like O'Connell, but he allowed others 
to sacrifice themselves for him without a word. 
For some such reason it was that Davitt com- 
plained he could be mean. Two critics have 
left severe criticisms of Parnell from very 
different points of view — Davitt, an agrarian 
revolutionary, and F. Hugh O'Donnell, an 
old-fashioned Catholic home ruler. Both con- 
demned him in character and policy in the 
most massive books which have been written 
on the Irish movement. Yet Parnell lives un- 
scathed in the memory of the race. His love 
for a woman is pardoned in his hate for Eng- 
land. 

His love of animals was probably his most 
Irish trait. He was once seen to be more con- 
cerned over the fate of a dog running under a 
crowd than in the feelings of the said crowd. 
Horses he generally preferred to men. He was 



THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 57 

English enough to be without humour. He 
read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland without 
being amused. Occasionally he could chaff a 
too serious follower. He used to joke about 
making Davitt inspector of Irish prisons under 
home rule, and the Fenian O'Kelly head of 
the Irish police. During the agonies of the 
split in his party he could chaff Justin Mc- 
Carthy on his chances of succession. He af- 
fected mystery in all things, partly out of the 
necessities of his life and partly to retain the 
wonder of the Irish people. He wore an ob- 
vious disguise in the London streets and was 
fond of disappearing from cabs. His knowl- 
edge of the motives of others was on a par 
with their ignorance of his. "I wish I knew 
what Parnell's politics are," said a close fol- 
lower. He was described as a conservative in 
feeling and as a revolutionary in action. 
Cecil Rhodes called him the most reasonable 
and sensible man he ever met. He led the 
most Tory people in Europe and in the name 
of democracy destroyed the most feudal of 
aristocracies. His distrust of the English was 
total, but he did not always trust the Irish 
either. A superstitious fringe lay under his 
fatalism. He was much upset by the fall of 
a picture of the Irish party just after the 



58 THE IRISH ISSUE 

Phoenix Park murders. He detested the colour 
green, which he intended one day to change 
from the national colour. He believed Ireland's 
bad luck was due to it. He could hardly be 
said to worship a God. He never swore, using 
only the mildest expressions. Like most men 
of destiny, he believed in Fate in the way that 
most men of thought believe in Providence. 

In the Middle Ages he would have been an 
alchemist. He spent long hours and consider- 
able moneys on his laboratory. From time to 
time he extracted minute particles of Wicklow 
gold on his estate. When human politics 
seethed about him he took consolation in his 
quarries or in sweeping the heavens with his 
telescope. He seems to have had a vague 
belief in star life, but the only human immor- 
tality he could conceive of was in children. 

To a race of orators he delivered himself in 
early years by what sounded like controlled 
hissings, but later in the shortest and most 
frigid of speech. His longer speeches left the 
"impression from a grey and sunless day in 
which everything shows clear but also hard 
and cold." But he had a softer voice which 
he used when addressing children or animals. 
The idol of an intensely religious race, he be- 
lieved perhaps in their idol but in little else. 



THE MEMORY OF PARNELL 59 

In the supreme moments of his life he was 
liable to appear dumb or indifferent. He ac- 
cepted the Parnell tribute without one word 
of thanks. To the ovation of crowd or House 
of Commons he was contemptuous. His lead- 
ership he regarded with a sensitive pride, 
which was also strong enough to carry him 
through disaster unto death. As a boy it was 
said he was fond of playing the game of "fol- 
low my leader" as long as he himself remained 
leader. It was the same in his after-life, for 
when he could no longer be leader he was not 
unready to die. 

It is interesting to compare him with the 
only contemporary Englishman occupying as 
great a hold on popular imagination, Randolph 
Churchill. Both were aristocrats by birth and 
breeding, who aimed at wielding great demo- 
cratic power. They were the only two of their 
generation to stand up to Gladstone in debate. 
His eloquence they met with scorn or ribaldry, 
but he lived to see them both laid in early 
graves. Both died at forty-six, under the 
clouds of disaster. It was only natural that 
they should have attracted each other at one 
time almost to the extent of coming to an 
understanding over the Irish question. Each 
in his time had revolted against an "old gang" 



60 THE IRISH ISSUE 

and set a devoted following towards pastures 
new. After a short conversation they broke, 
Parnell claiming that he had got more out of 
Churchill than the latter out of him. In the 
day of his ruin Churchill regretted that he did 
not possess ParnelFs "dogged and sinister 
resolution." In the end both were betrayed 
by their own colleagues and finally cut down 
in the house of their friends. Whatever mis- 
takes they made they paid the price before 
they died. Both had striven to lead their 
parties into new paths and both were cast out 
to die alone in madness and despair, 



IV 

THE TREASON OF THE REDMONDS 

John Redmond succeeded to ParnelPs chair 
and fate. The majority of Irishmen in Amer- 
ica believe or say that the Redmond brothers 
betrayed Ireland in the first and vital stage of 
the war. That they gratuitously gave Ire- 
land's aid to England and that they got noth- 
ing for it, not even a staff billet for Willie 
Redmond or an Order of Merit for John. It is 
felt that they made a political blunder of the 
first magnitude and all but compromised the 
honour of their country. That Ireland only 
succeeded in recovering herself by a miracle 
and her honour by an insurrection, while the 
Redmonds went their downward way and were 
appropriately paid for trusting England. That 
one of them lies dead in France and the other 
is politically dead in Ireland. 

John Redmond's political work has turned 
to ash and his twenty years of leadership is 
accounted for nought. No doubt his brother 
found German steel softer to bear than he has 

61 



62 THE IRISH ISSUE 

found Irish reproaches. Betrayed in all his 
hopes for Ireland, but serene in conscience, he 
awaits nevertheless the judgment of history. 
Once John was venerated of all men Irish and 
Willie was the idol of the race, the D'Artagnan 
of Irish politics. But nations as well as indi- 
viduals must ofttimes kill the thing they love. 
And for the time being Ireland seems to have 
put them both out of mind and out of love. 
The root of the accusation is that John Red- 
mond made a colossal blunder in offering the 
Irish sword to the allied cause without stop- 
ping to take counsel of his people first and 
without insisting on the immediate delivery of 
home rule upon its tip. As a nationalist poli- 
tician his failure must seem lamentable to all 
lovers of a close deal. He had a wonderful 
chance to bargain. England's fierce and sud- 
den need was Ireland's miraculous opportunity. 
More than the word of any other single man 
in the world, England needed Redmond's word 
of approval and allegiance to the principle un- 
derlying the war. Germany had declared war, 
implicitly trusting in the information that Ire- 
land was divided from England and divided 
against herself. There was only one man in a 
position to give the United Kingdom the ap- 
pearance of unity in face of war. It was John 



TREASON OF THE REDMONDS 63 

Redmond, and from higher considerations than 
the mere political he spoke the word which 
gave Germany the severest jolt that any un- 
official individual may be said to have given her 
during the war. He took his chances as every 
national leader who has come into this war 
has had to take chances. There was the chance 
of a long war and there was a chance that all 
his people would not follow him all the time. 
Fate but not honour failed him. He did not 
betray Ireland in theory or in practice, but he 
may be said to have betrayed himself, for both 
English politicians and Irish critics took ad- 
vantage of the side which he so generously 
bared. It was apparent that he gave his pound 
of blood and got nothing for it. He seemed 
to have failed to perform the first duty of a 
politician in not seizing his advantage. The 
political opponents of a lifetime would have 
been at his mercy if he had privately bargained 
for home rule before he made his speech. 
Ireland has come to regret and assail his action. 
Only the winds of history, which make havoc 
of subterfuge and policy, can make plain his 
position as a statesman and a European. 

The war has become a severely altruistic 
war. Nobody dares to fight for sheer conquest 
or revenge. Moral principle and self-sacrifice 



64 THE IRISH ISSUE 

are the only permissible pivots of action. From 
this point of view, the point of view from 
which the participants in the war will be 
judged, it is better to forego one's rights than 
to imperil those of others, better to be cheated 
than to cheat. It is not so in politics, but it 
is so in a war waged for the moralities of the 
world. The higher that one appraises the 
ethics of the Allies, the higher one must rate 
Redmond. He represents principle undone by 
facts. Facts have destroyed his political value, 
but if he no longer represents Ireland in poli- 
tics, he comes near to representing something 
in national relations, which since the blight of 
Machiavelli had been lost to Christendom. 

And yet it is hard to see how he could have 
acted otherwise. He had always been insist- 
ing that if England gave Ireland home rule, 
the Irish would help instead of embarrass the 
empire. He was accused of saying one thing 
in Westminster and another thing in America. 
Yet thirty years ago in Chicago he was saying, 
"We have given England the most convincing 
proof that on the concession of liberty we can 
be trusty friends." He and his whole party 
had been elected and re-elected without re- 
pudiation of this promise by their constituents. 
The Irish had implicitly accepted the saying 



TREASON OF THE REDMONDS 65 

from Redmond's lips and Carson had explicitly 
ridiculed it to Ulster's huge assent. 

Whether Redmond was a weak man leaning 
to the line of least resistance or a strong man 
exercising that moderation which only strong 
men can, others may decide. For the moment 
he seemed to have united Ireland, to have 
broken the feud between England and Ireland 
and to have played a successful game in the 
open. The hour of penetrating and unrelent- 
ing test, which visits every individual and every 
nation in such a war, came to Redmond as it 
came to the King of the Belgians. It was 
equally a case of betraying the material advan- 
tages of his position that a principle might live. 
On the moral issue in Europe Redmond re- 
versed the domestic policy of Ireland. He ap- 
pealed to the Ulster and National Volunteers 
to unite in the defence of Ireland. He turned 
to the government with the cry: 'You may 
remove your troops from Ireland!" Out of a 
moment of epic he seemed to have snatched 
the Irish millennium, but all three to whom he 
appealed were to fail him. The Ulster Volun- 
teers had no wish to make up a United Ireland. 
They kept aloof. The government showed no 
desire to trust the honour of the Irish people or 
the words of their leader. Redmond's sup- 



66 THE IRISH ISSUE 

porters discovered that they had not sent him 
to Parliament to decide moral issues on the 
Continent, but to extort home rule. It was 
probably as much his duty as a politician to 
win home rule out of the crisis as it was his 
duty as a European statesman not to make 
confusion in the one spot to which Ulster action 
had directed the eyes of the All Highest. As 
a result of his action Ireland became the one 
bright spot — momentarily. 

Home rule was put on the statute-book, but 
with a proviso that it must await the end of 
the war to come into effect. To have made 
Redmond Irish premier would have hastened 
the end of the war. Supreme and enlightened 
policy would have led England to pay the poli- 
tician's fee in return for the statesman's sacri- 
fice. Had he used England's plight to play a 
political game, Ireland's plight might have 
been worse in the end. He who acts in such 
days as a mere politician shall perish as such. 
Redmond threw politics to the wind and politi- 
cal death cannot harm his name. 

There is no doubt that Redmond saw a 
great opportunity to place Ireland on the 
proper level she should occupy in relation to 
neighbouring countries like France and Eng- 
land. This was obvious to many of the Sinn 



TREASON OF THE REDMONDS 67 

Feiners, who were ready to enter into any mili- 
tary scheme which guaranteed the national 
honour. Only, some form of national govern- 
ment to sanction and control any national sac- 
rifice in the field was a sine qua non. Unfor- 
tunately Tory political influence was strong 
enough to insist that Ireland's contribution to 
the defence of France should pass as strictly 
British. The green flag was denied in the field 
and every proposal of the Irish party was 
scorned by the callous war office. 

What the imperial politicians failed to see 
was Redmond's unique value to the empire. 
Here was a war for small nationalities and here 
was the proffer of a small nation's sword ! 
Here was a war between two military imperial 
Powers and a free Ireland better than any 
propaganda would have distinguished the qual- 
ity of the one from the other ! Here was a 
keen tussle for public opinion in America, and 
Redmond installed as an Irish premier would 
have been in a position to appeal for it. The 
cry went out later and the research magnificent 
was made for the man who would save the 
empire. Hughes was discovered in Australia, 
Smuts was hailed in South Africa, and Borden 
boomed in Canada. The blinded Cabinet never 
realised that nothing would have sooner closed 



68 THE IRISH ISSUE 

fissures in the empire or insured the co-opera- 
tion of the self-governing colonies better than 
an Irish premier in their councils. It would 
also have encouraged America during the thirty 
months she required to make up her mind. 
But it was not to be, and Redmond was strand- 
ed between two seas, between the unimagina- 
tive inanity of the government after the dec- 
laration of war and the savagery of sorrow 
which swept through Ireland after the rising. 

Such was the tragedy which befell the Red- 
monds. Locally and through the blundering of 
others they have fallen into disregard, but the 
day will come when Irish historians will be glad 
to take refuge amidst the after-war controver- 
sies in the first and solemn stand which the 
Irish leader made in the name of his people 
against the destruction of Belgium, though for 
the time he was stranded, a spectacle to Celtic 
deities and to all political mankind. 

The death of Willie Redmond in the field was 
one of the most dramatic and pathetic events 
in the war. For a quarter of a century he had 
represented the stony hills of Clare in the 
stonier wastes of Westminster. In the old days 
so many of the men of Clare went to fight in 
France that France was spoken of as the 
graveyard of Clare. The ancient and honour- 



TREASON OF THE REDMONDS 69 

able doom of Clare befell Willie Redmond. 
By an irony of fate not unknown in Ireland he 
was carried back to die by the men of Ulster, 
whom he had so long opposed in politics. 
Death in Ireland was not granted to him, as it 
was not granted either to O'Connell or Parnell. 
O'Connell died in Genoa, broken by the famine, 
overthrown by the revolutionists. Parnell also 
crept away from Ireland to die, because the 
people who were to weep over him dead rent 
him living. Ear from Clare and apart from 
the men of Clare, Willie Redmond died, tast- 
ing the doom which is the doom of the leaders 
of Ireland. Those who serve Ireland have 
found that her service leads to disappointment 
and even to death, but that if the service of 
Ireland is bitterer than death it is also sweeter 
than life. The Irish themselves will always be 
a good excuse for God's goodness to their dead 
leaders. 

So it fares with the Redmonds. One has 
died as a soldier and the other shall one day 
live as a statesman with Venizelos and Lieb- 
knecht, the prototypes of a new era when lead- 
ers shall have learnt to sacrifice themselves 
rather than pass over the infringement of the 
higher law. Ireland has wished to forget John 
Redmond. The day will come when the Irish 



70 THE IRISH ISSUE 

will find his name as great a slogan upon their 
lips as " Remember Limerick/ 5 the city of the 
broken treaty. It will be the English who will 
wish to forget him then, for the historians to 
come will remember him, whatever the poets 
may utter of malediction against him to-day. 






V 

THE ETHICS OF SINN FEIN 

Few words have incurred such wide-spread in- 
terest as a result of the war as the hitherto ob- 
scure password Sinn Fein. A word which a few 
years ago was known to only a comparatively 
few thinkers and propagandists in Ireland has 
since been canvassed by the press of the world. 
Sinn Fein is still a stumbling-block to philolo- 
gists as well as to politicians. Sinn Fein is 
simply the Gaelic for "ourselves," which, after 
all, is the working motto of every government 
and corporation in the modern ring. Trusts 
and tariffs are Sinn Fein applied to the indus- 
trial world. The workings of empires and 
chosen peoples are pure Sinn Fein. But there 
is a Sinn Fein of the conquered as well as of 
the conqueror. If Moses led a Sinn Fein offen- 
sive into Palestine, the Ghetto was no less a 
hotbed of mediaeval Sinn Fein thrown back 
upon itself. Applied to nationalism Sinn Fein 
is the expression of personality in a people, but 
whether as a means of defence or offence — 

71 



72 THE IRISH ISSUE 

there lies the rub of modern history. As Wash- 
ington said: "I want an American character 
that the Powers of Europe may be convinced 
we act for ourselves." 

The small nationality is a Sinn Fein propo- 
sition. It is curious to think of old John Huss 
as the grandfather of all Sinn Fein. Yet he 
told the Council of Constance that "Bohemians 
should have by right the chief place in the 
offices of the Kingdom of Bohemia, even as 
they that are French-born in the Kingdom of 
France and the Germans in their own country, 
whereby the Bohemian might have the faculty 
to rule his people and the Germans bear rule 
over the Germans." The importance of the 
Bohemians in Europe has always been that 
they form a Slavic wedge between two branches 
of the German people, just as Ireland's strength 
or weakness as a world factor depends on her 
geographical position in the Atlantic between 
the two great branches of the xAnglo-Saxon race. 
Bohemia is an inland Ireland. It is interesting 
that both countries should have been strongly 
pro-French in the war of 1870, when left to 
their own instincts. The modern Czech asso- 
ciations correspond largely to those of Gaelic 
Ireland. The Sokols, for instance, a Pan-Slavic 
athletic society, is exactly what the Gaelic 



THE ETHICS OF SINN FEIN 73 

Athletic Association is to Ireland. During the 
war Sinn Fein in Bohemia has been crushed 
with a ruthlessness that we can only be thank- 
ful was not applied in Ireland. The Bohemians 
have refused to be conscripted for other than 
Bohemian ends, and regiments have been deci- 
mated to order. War likewise has been made 
on the literary men and the poets, for the poets 
have always been on the side of the small na- 
tionalities. The muse of the Jingo has run 
sterile during this war. Kipling's reputation 
has shared that of the generals, but Verhaeren 
of Belgium, Macdonagh of Dublin, and Machar 
of Bohemia, their song shall endure. 

Sinn Fein is definitely the policy of all small 
nationalities. It moves by laws which are 
common to different countries. It has invari- 
ably the poetry of the lost cause attached to it 
and the menace of a greater nation to secure it 
the sympathy of the rest of the world. Poland 
has practised Sinn Fein as well as it has been 
able ever since the partitions. Belgium is the 
Sinn Fein in the German ointment. Greek 
Sinn Fein enlisted Byron and brought about 
the battle of Navarino. Italian Sinn Fein was 
incarnate in Garibaldi and thrust Austria out of 
Venice. The British have always fostered and 
applauded Continental varieties of Sinn Fein. 



74 THE IRISH ISSUE 

Pro-Ally propaganda describes the case for 
Sinn Fein in Bohemia to-day. The programme 
of the Czechs is apparently not very different 
from that of the Irish Nationalists. Doctor 
Kramarz, the leader of the young Czechs, seems 
to have occupied a similar position to John 
McNeill, the Sinn Fein leader in Ireland. 
Kramarz had no wish to be disloyal to Austria, 
provided Bohemia was recognised. He was 
willing to be pro- Austrian in an Austria which 
gave freedom to the Slavic ideal, just as Irish 
Nationalists were always ready to make their 
peace with an empire that did not disparage 
the ideal of the Gael. Kramarz, a successor 
of Huss, realised sadly that "a foreign policy 
focussed in Berlin leaves no room for the Aus- 
trian Slavs." Curiously enough, both Kram- 
arz and McNeill were condemned to penal 
servitude within a few days of each other for 
the crime of treason on perfectly general 
grounds. In releasing McNeill the British 
realised their mistake. The Austrians have 
not. 

In Ireland the Sinn Fein movement was in- 
dustrial, linguistic, and ethical. Valiant efforts 
were made to grow Irish tobacco and to enjoy 
it with the aid of Irish matches. Every class 
and profession was touched by an almost re- 



THE ETHICS OF SINN FEIN 75 

ligious desire for native productions. Scribe 
and poet demanded Irish paper and Irish ink, 
There arose a passionate request for Irish cloth 
and fabric and even for Irish rosaries. Char- 
women charred happier with native soap, and 
Celtic characters on the sign-posts became 
equally the source of travellers' joy and per- 
plexity. The most ambitious point in the pro- 
gramme demanded that English goods should 
be excluded and that the Irish representation 
should remain at home. The root idea was not 
Irish in origin but was frankly based on the 
similar movement which led to a national res- 
urrection of Hungary. Those who cradled and 
pioneered it were laughed at for a "green Hun- 
garian band" with that fatal facility for nick- 
name in Irish life. 

Such a movement, however vague and mean- 
ingless to English understanding, had quite a 
comprehensible analogy with such ripples in 
English life as the Ritualist, ^Esthetic, or 
Christian Socialist movements. The form may 
be different, but the matter, the wine of youth, 
the enthusiasm of idealists, the desire for bet- 
ter things, the revolt from conventional stale- 
ness and mediocrity, was the same in both 
countries. It would have been curious to 
know what would have happened to such sweet 



76 THE IRISH ISSUE 

but impatient spirits as Hurrell Froude, Kings- 
ley, and Morris had they been born in Ireland. 
Cardinal Newman confessed that he would 
have been a rebel had he been an Irishman. 

So with song and high hope the Gaelic move- 
ment swung under way. At most it did not 
lead to more than a battle of the books in those 
days of boyish defiance and literary contro- 
versy. Only a few among the Sinn Feiners 
brooded a warlike application of the ancient 
dream. Yet this movement under normal con- 
ditions should no more have led to bloodshed 
than the Oxford movement have terminated in 
a gunpowder plot. But Ireland is never nor- 
mal. 

Before the rising the Sinn Fein were unable 
to win an election. Their solitary appearance 
in a Leitrim constituency met with a signal 
defeat from the Nationalist machine. As they 
were by their very programme destructive of 
the Irish party the attitude of the latter was 
perhaps excusable. The Irish party was then 
slowly satisfying that national ideal which only 
when in extremis and desperation assumes the 
revolutionary colour. But the estrangement 
with the old leaders came. They broke away 
from Redmond's constitutionalism and from 
Douglas Hyde, who resigned the presidency of 



THE ETHICS OF SINN FEIN 77 

the Gaelic League when he refused to make it 
political. During a long quarter of a century 
Parliament had afforded a safety-valve to na- 
tionalism, but the defeats and delays of home 
rule proved an irritant of gathering force. 
Time is never on the side of sedative or solution 
in Ireland. Event must keep pace with emo- 
tion, and result must feed demand. "Home 
rule at no distant date" became a byword 
synonymous with the Greek or Celtic kalends. 
Only Redmond's handling of the lightning con- 
ductor in Parliament averted the bolt. But 
time and destiny and bureaucracy, an inexora- 
ble trio, tended to neutralise his gallant efforts 
before and after the outbreak of the war. 

Meantime the Sinn Fein went under the im- 
pulse of an overriding idea, leaderless. The 
men who had inspired them were constitution- 
alists, but were incapable of adding direction. 
What is not yet known for the purposes of his- 
tory is when the Irish Revolutionary Brother- 
hood rose like a ghost out of the past and as- 
sumed control. Long after the cordiality of 
settled peace has been restored to Europe men 
may perhaps become agreed as to what were 
the real causes and incidents of the Irish ris- 
ing. We only know that the Sinn Feiners rose 
swiftly and blindly, but for the local ideals 



78 THE IRISH ISSUE 

which Germany is elsewhere trying to crush. 
They died wantonly and superfluously on behalf 
of their liberty. They met and slew men, who 
also after their manner had enlisted in the 
cause of liberty. They went out and threw 
Ireland into confusion for a generation to come, 
but with suicidal gesture and distorted phrase 
nevertheless they were pleading for the life and 
right of a small nationality. 

Once again the Nameless One that presides 
over the mortal side of Irish history had min- 
gled the woof with direst tragedy. Fortunately 
indeed, there is an immortal side as well, which 
no tragedy can touch, no politics embitter, and 
no madness destroy. 

The original dreamers of the Sinn Fein who 
had remained aloof from the rising came out of 
the wilderness. They carried before them into 
battle the dead martyrs, and the electorate 
was theirs for the taking. In Celtic Ireland 
armies carried the potent bodies of dead Kings 
in their battle-front and attributed victory to 
them. In like manner the Sinn Fein can now 
sweep an emotional majority in any two seats 
out of three in Ireland. For the time even the 
historic feud with England waits while the 
Sinn Fein settle their long score with the Irish 
party. Irishmen of the most different brand 



THE ETHICS OF SINN FEIN 79 

can take pride but never pity in each other. 
It is grim how Celt can fall upon Celt, and all 
to make a British holiday. One remembers 
Carson dissecting his unhappy fellow Irishman, 
Oscar Wilde, in the witness box, and Russell of 
Killowen closing pitilessly on Piggott the forger 
of the Parnell letters. Yet they were Irishmen 
all. When there is a great Irish triumph there 
is too often Irish suffering in the background. 
The slow agony of the Irish party began at the 
unabsolving hands of the Sinn Fein. Woe to 
the politician who did not discern the signs of 
the time ! for his place shall be made vacant 
and his bishopric given to another. Woe to 
the man of letters who at the time misjudged 
the rising of the Sinn Fein ! for he shall be cut 
out of the soul of his own people. As Rolland 
Romain by his neutrality above the clouds of 
battle lost the love which would have been 
added to the admiration which his fellow 
countrymen feel for his writings, so it is with 
the Irish writer whose pen did not beat to the 
agony of Easter week. 

The Sinn Fein is not an abortion but is in 
symbolic relations to the whole labouring earth. 
The time has come, as Henry VIII said on 
being told all Ireland could not govern the 
Earl of Kildare, "then let the Earl of Kildare 



80 THE IRISH ISSUE 

govern all Ireland," that the Sinn Fein prov- 
ing ungovernable should be placed in a posi- 
tion to govern themselves. Responsibility alone 
can anchor idealists to earth. Sooner or later 
they will come to terms with Ulster. Already 
they have destroyed the power of the Irish 
party, and in the future they promise to check 
if not annul the political power of the priest. 
Just as the Ulster sedition was led by "loyal- 
ists," so the anticlerical movement in Ireland 
is led by curates. 

But Sinn Fein has reached its day, and for 
long there will be neither quarter or compro- 
mise. Sinn Fein is a fever, against which there 
is no appeal, terrorising and exalting the emo- 
tions of a whole generation with something be- 
tween the psychology of a race riot and of a 
religious revival. Only the judicious and the 
middle-aged and the uninspired can afford to 
stand aside. The riffraff and the rowdy of 
Ireland are of it, but so also are the radiant 
and the righteous of soul, some of the best that 
a nation can contain. Time only can show 
whether the sediment from the troubled waters 
will yield the base of a nation or of a faction 
only. Even so the faction of to-day is the 
nation of to-morrow. 



VI 

THE PRESIDENCY OF PEARSE 

The presidency of Patrick Pearse in the 
Irish republic was one of the most sudden and 
sifting events of Irish history. There have 
been other bolts from the green, but in the 
memory of man none so startling in origin, so 
piteous in end, or so far-reaching in result. The 
Phcenix Park murders and the Parnellite split, 
which in other countries would not have caused 
more than a nine days' wonder, were sufficient 
to dash Irish hopes and to affect remote parts 
of the earth. The presidency of Patrick Pearse 
during a blood-shot week in Dublin has changed 
the course of Irish history, and in its far- 
thrown ripple proved only second to the Rus- 
sian revolution in the extraneous interest it 
roused. 

Pearse will be remembered for the last week 
and especially for the last minute of his life, 
and less for the patient, faithful years when 
he laboured as a journalist in what was to him 
a strange tongue, and later as a pioneer among 

81 



82 THE IRISH ISSUE 

Irish schoolmasters. As many books will be 
written on the subject as there were hours in 
the life of the short-lived republic. Historians 
will collate the incidents and philosophers ex- 
pound the ethics. Controversialists will con- 
trovert the facts and idealists conflict over the 
ideals. Few will open the Gaelic files in which 
so much of Pearse's writing was done or give 
themselves over to the study of the education- 
alist. Yet his greatest work was done in the 
schools. Before he revolutionised the Iri^h 
capital, Pearse had revolutionised the Irish 
school. 

In a moment of inspiration he left his desk 
as editor of the Cleeve Sholuis, or Sword of 
Light, and founded Scoil Enna or St. Enda's 
School, in which he proposed to carry on the 
education of Irish boys, as though the centuries 
of English occupation and culture had never 
been, and Irish Ireland were a reality. The 
Irish language, dress, customs, and traditions 
were made part of the school life. It came as 
a distinct shock verging on astonishment to 
the other school curricula of Ireland. For the 
boys were not taken to be stuffed like birds 
for the examination market, but were fostered 
rather as children were in ancient Ireland, who 
were placed in the suites of well-known heroes 



THE PRESIDENCY OF PEARSE 83 

or Kings, that the best might be brought out 
in them through emulation of their hosts. The 
head master of St. Enda's compared his boys 
to the boy corps at Royal Emania, who prac- 
tised for heroics in war and literature under 
the eagle eye of the King of Ireland. "The 
King is with his foster children," we are told, 
was a frequent answer at Court in those far-off 
Gaelic days. While the clan lasted, fosterage 
played its part in Ireland. To revive it in edu- 
cational guise was a step of genius that could 
only have occurred to Patrick Pearse. Boys 
arrived from all over Ireland and for very small 
fees were initiated into the whole gamut of 
Gaelic living and dying, in fact into the long- 
lost art of the heroic life. The intellectual up- 
rising of Dublin was then at its height, and 
masters and boys entered into it not only as 
students but as performers. Such first-class lit- 
terateurs as Thomas MacDonagh and Padraic 
Colum joined the staff. The school indulged 
in pageants and plays. Literary Dublin, in- 
terested in the Gaelic revival, attended their 
pageant of heroic Ireland in the city suburbs. 
Another day a kind of passion play was given 
in the old language. Nobody believed that 
the school could last. John McNeill and 
Stephen Gwynn sent their boys. Others de- 



84 THE IRISH ISSUE 

murred at the sacrifice to be made to the an- 
tique. There was a melancholy expectation 
that for a few months Pearse's talents would 
be spent with a few kilted boys translating a 
book of Euclid into Connact Irish. But the 
school continued in spite of every financial diffi- 
culty, and even flowered into larger premises. 
Pearse made one flying visit to America, whose 
streets he trod, meeting with as little recogni- 
tion as Rupert Brooke, who soon after passed 
unbailed through the same land, where each 
was to find posthumous hero-worship. With 
such funds as his friends and lecturing produced 
he kept his school in the front line of Irish 
education. To politics and to home rule bills 
he was indifferent, believing that no act of 
alien Parliament could restore a nation's soul. 
His school not only taught but it also made 
history. St. Enda's began as a pastoral idyll 
in the suburbs of Rathmines and it finished 
as a fiery epic under the burning ruins of the 
Dublin post office. 

Pearse was a man of a single dream, of a 
single life, of a single heart, of a single ideal. 
He became historical through a single decision 
and famous in a single week. Simplicity and 
straightforwardness was his policy in the face 
of fact and the assaults of absurdity. He al- 



THE PRESIDENCY OF PEARSE 85 

ways made the extreme course the short cut to 
his soul's desire. He did not mind being singu- 
lar, even to the extent of making Irish theo- 
retically his single speech. There was no turn- 
ing or influencing him once he had chosen his 
path. He was as poetic, as revolutionary, and 
as wayward as Shelley, but with a sombre 
touch that took the place of passion in his life. 
What atheism was to Shelley's youthful en- 
thusiasm, Fenianism was to Pearse. In a mind 
otherwise so gentle, it was the one terrible and 
besetting strain. 

The theme of death, disaster, and suffering 
for Ireland never left his thought. Whether he 
worked as a barrister or as a schoolmaster, 
while his vocation was religious or journalistic, 
he seemed to be haunted by an icy breath from 
the coming years. He was never in love ex- 
cept with his abstract goal of a free Ireland. 
He enjoyed the sadness of meditation and was 
expectant of shame in the Irish cause. In his 
poems this was darkly shown to those who 
could interpret them. Death was his familiar, 
and he coquetted with the grave. Alan Sea- 
ger's " rendez-vous with death," found its exact 
Gaelic parody in Pearse' s lines: 

"a rann I made to my love, 
to the king of kings, ancient death," 



*\ 



86 THE IRISH ISSUE 

Death was not his only devotion. He was 
passionately fond of children, and he cared for 
all small creeping things. His pupils were 
placed under stringent oath never to hurt bird 
or butterfly. Poetry, folk-lore, and symbolism 
possessed him. He that loved so many un- 
substantial things from the God, who in a 
moment of fantasy created Ireland, to the 
songs that Gaelic beggar men sing at the cross- 
roads, needed to find one object of enmity. 
And he found it in history, out of which he 
dug the Englishman of the penal days, and 
against whom he set his heart with unrelenting 
zeal. As he wrote once: "I will take no pike. 
I will go into the battle with bare hands. I 
will stand up before the Gall, as Christ hung 
naked before men on the tree." With such a 
prophet what was there to be done? For he 
prophesied his own death and took the first 
opportunity to seek its fulfilment. In St. 
Enda's used to hang a mystical picture of a 
mourning woman, under whose cloak clustered 
thickly the little naked manikin souls of men. 
It looked like some very doleful virgin salving 
the sons of earth in purgatory. It was a rep- 
resentation of the dead who died for Ireland, 
whom Pearse had vowed to join. 

Though the school lived in an atmosphere of 



THE PRESIDENCY OF PEARSE 87 

past rebellions and Pearse sometimes spoke of 
the enthusiasm with which he felt he could lead 
out the boys, yet there was never the slight- 
est attempt to drill the boys or to secrete arms. 
Revolt was purely academical and, besides, 
the whole trend of the Gaelic movement was 
to save Ireland by books rather than by the 
blunderbuss. By ballad and not by bullet 
would MacDonagh have preferred to train 
boys to free their land. So in those delightful 
early days there, was more trouble with the 
tradesmen than with the British Government. 
The school lived a happy-go-lucky life of its 
own, becoming in a few years one of the set- 
tled institutions of Dublin. Archbishop Walsh 
gave it his sanction and wondering visitors 
never failed it. In the background Pearse was 
for ever conspiring with the phantoms of his 
own mind. 

With the Carson episode and the Ulster gun- 
running, Fenian dreams began to take concrete 
shape among the dreamers and poets of Dub- 
lin. Thinkers were quick-witted enough to 
see that Carson had played indirectly into the 
hands of the physical-force men. While the 
Ulstermen stood within their undoubted rights 
and defied Redmond or the government to ad- 
vance upon their homelands, unprotected save 



88 THE IRISH ISSUE 

by Bible and covenant, they were playing a 
winning game, which would have won them 
sympathy all over the world and turned the 
polls in England. It was essential for their 
policy to provoke the Nationalists to take the 
offensive and strike the first blow. Redmond's 
statecraft counselled patience, and secure in 
their constitutional triumph the Nationalists 
bore every contumely that was hurled at them. 
If riot or trouble occurred, the Ulstermen had 
everything to gain by them. But in their 
anger and pride they made the huge blunder 
of creating the trouble themselves and carry- 
ing out a serious arming. It hurt them politi- 
cally as much as it lost the Kaiser to take the 
offensive against France. Had Ulster and Ger- 
many waited to be attacked in their own homes 
they would not have each lost the sympathy 
of the American people. 

The state of the chess-board in Ireland is 
such that a really bold move by either side 
leads to consequences that can never be over- 
taken. Destiny enters to play her gambit. 
The arming of Ulster led to the semi-arming of 
Dublin. Carson sowed the wind in the hills 
of Ulster and the Fenians went out with bloody 
blades to reap the whirlwind. The signing of 
the covenant in Belfast led indirectly to the 



THE PRESIDENCY OF PEARSE 89 

mobilisation of St. Enda's school. The head 
master became a soldier, a conspirator, and 
finally in the dark of night was elected a 
president. 

From that moment until he faced the firing 
squad he stood on the edge of burning limelight. 
Every order he gave made Irish history, and 
every word he wrote passed direct into the 
dark scroll of Ireland's story. It is curious 
how schoolmasters and professors have played 
more striking and world-stirring parts than the 
professional earth and cloud compellers in this 
war. There is Professor Wilson. There is an 
old scholastic professor of Louvain, who an- 
swered Bissing in deed as bravely as he had 
answered Kant in philosophy. And then we 
have the head master of St. Enda ? s. When will 
the world be wise enough to follow Plato's ad- 
vice to make philosophers king ? 

There is no need to canonise or excoriate 
Pearse. He saw and took his chance. Living 
under the shadow of Dublin Castle, stung by 
the differential treatment awarded to Ulster 
and Irish rebels, he and his companions had 
little occasion to think out the international 
problem from their own premises. Their sense 
of thwarted nationality was so intense that 
they could not see Europe. And Europe, it 



90 THE IRISH ISSUE 

seemed, had forgotten that Ireland was a na- 
tion. Clinging to their broken tree, they could 
not see the wood. Had some miraculous 
change in British statesmanship assured Ireland 
of national rights at the outbreak of war, it 
might have been otherwise, for Pearse was 
susceptible to the miraculous. But it seemed 
that the mighty wings of the empire rushing 
to war were extinguishing the Irish lamp. And 
Nationalists, in their determination to keep 
alight the flicker of Gaelic Ireland upon their 
own hearth could not trouble about the forest- 
fire outside. 

So the revolt took place. It was inevitable. 
It was not glorious but it was salutary. It 
was the only important event in Ireland since 
the death of Parnell. It seemed as though 
Dublin had risen like a hysterical woman and 
stabbed a man in armour with a broken bod- 
kin to avenge some far-off unhappy thing, and 
was summarily suppressed. There were things 
done on both sides which both would prefer to 
forget, but which the politicians on either side 
will never allow to rest. It was a rough-and- 
tumble duel with as much honour and chivalry 
involved as either side care to extract. It was 
brief, unbrotherly, sudden, and spectacular. It 
was not war — but it made history. There were 



THE PRESIDENCY OF PEARSE 91 

genuine traits of humanity shown. Soldiers 
called on Sinn Feiners to clear out before they 
turned on their machine-guns. A Sinn Feiner 
recognised an officer on whom he had fired and 
ran out to apologise. Pearse was insistent on 
the kind treatment of the prisoners. It was 
his intense susceptibility to the suffering of 
others that brought the rebellion to a close. 
He had steeled his heart to the killing of sol- 
diers or of his followers, but he was broken down 
by rumours that civilians were enduring the 
peine forte et dure of war. He surrendered and 
caused others to surrender, "in order to pre- 
vent the further slaughter of unarmed people." 
Otherwise the revolt might have lasted for 
weeks. His heart was stronger than his head. 
But in surrendering he was unconsciously put- 
ting the authorities into a quandary. Were 
they to be executed as criminals or imprisoned 
as prisoners of war ? Up to this moment there 
had only been a half -sympathetic, half-sorrow- 
ful feeling for men waging a fight that was lost 
before it was begun. As for those who were 
killed in the fighting, they slew and were slain. 
They took up the sword and perished by the 
sword. But the execution of Pearse and his 
fellows, however approved by the authorities, 
was playing into their dead hands. What they 



m THE IRISH ISSUE 

were unable to achieve alive they had succeeded 
in doing dead. They had roused Ireland ! 

England might have done otherwise than 
exact her pound of flesh, if she had been wise, 
but to individual officials it must have seemed 
impossible. With their limited outlook they 
could not be expected to understand what these 
men meant to Ireland or in the world at large. 
Like Pontius Pilate, or the American authorities 
who hung John Brown, they could but con- 
demn idealists who were also revolutionary. 
John Brown had hurled himself against slavery 
as Pearse had hurled himself against British 
rule in Ireland. There is nothing in the Bible 
against either of those institutions, against slav- 
ery or imperialism, but the consensus of civili- 
sation has long decided that they are obsolete, 
in spite of all arguments as to the benefits of 
slave or imperial power. 

Pearse can only have died in the best of hu- 
mour with life, for it had given him the death 
he had lived for. Seldom, indeed, it comes to 
a dreamer to find himself in the midst of his 
dream coming true. He cannot even have felt 
out of humour with the hereditary enemy, for 
it, too, had given him the tragedy and the set- 
ting of the tragedy he had so often imagined 
in his mind's eye, even unto artillery and a 



THE PRESIDENCY OF PEARSE 93 

blazing capital. He may have felt a little out 
of humour with the Irish, for they had not re- 
sponded to his appeal. Even Dublin was out 
of sympathy with his revolt, until it was all 
over. But for a century he will be the national 
hero of Ireland. In time his relics will be 
picked out of the quicklime, and his fellow- 
townsmen will even give him a statue, though 
there is no doubt that he would be more grate- 
ful for the quicklime than for a crumbling 
image. For the shroud of quicklime makes 
immortal raiment — in Ireland. 



VII 

THE KILLING OF KETTLE 

In the great flood of literature which has car- 
ried the names of the Sinn Feiners out of the 
obscurity of their local fight into written his- 
tory, there has been slight mention of Tom 
Kettle. Yet of all the Young Irelanders he 
was perhaps the most brilliant, and his end 
was certainly more tragic, for he passed from 
the scene of his beloved Dublin, lying with her 
heart blown out, to his own grave in the less 
dramatic but more terrible field of France. 

He was ever the brilliant boy, the coming 
man of his generation in Ireland. All his gifts, 
impulses, and ambitions were of the highest 
order. In his short, well-rounded life he made 
good equally as a ballad writer, as a member 
of Parliament, as a professor of political econ- 
omy, and finally as a soldier. He was the per- 
fect type of the Dubliner in the new century. 
He was a pessimist in philosophy and an opti- 
mist in politics. Of the crowd of young men 
who were trying to sound the new channels or 

94 



THE KILLING OF KETTLE 95 

sipping the new wines of Irish life, some were 
poets and some were dreamers. Kettle was 
both, and he was in addition a first-rate meta- 
physician. He had plunged deep in Schopen- 
hauer and had dallied with Nietzsche, whom he 
attacked with passionate violence in his last 
book. His charm was that he was a primitive 
Celt grafted to modern culture. He had read 
Nietzsche before most of his modern assailants 
had even heard his name as a symbol, and ad- 
mitted that " he made German dance as before 
him only Heine had done." Nevertheless he 
summed him up as "the mysticism of the mad- 
house" and the "metaphysics of bullying." 
But the dark philosophers had steeped his soul, 
and there were moments of wrestling and de- 
spair. It was a miracle of intellect that he 
kept the Catholic faith. 

Ireland is one of the few countries where 
successful examinations can lead to a political 
career. For some abstruse reason the pale and 
nerve-racked student was pressed into the ranks 
of the Irish party. Overwork, oversensitive- 
ness, and his peculiar brilliance of mind made 
him in many ways unsuited for the rough work 
of Westminster, where sordidness is the only 
relief from the background of tedium. His 
speech was quick and nervous, but it was 



96 THE IRISH ISSUE 

packed with thought, and occasionally there 
rose a bitter sense of fun to play upon the sur- 
face. As a speaker in the debates he could 
always claim Mr. Balfour as a ready listener. 
The bons mots that crept into all he said were 
reminiscent of the age of wits. When the 
tariff reformers thrust the unwilling and un- 
witting Mr. Balfour to the front, he remarked: 
'They have nailed their leader to the mast." 
As brilliant was his distinction between the 
two great parties in English politics. "When 
in office the Liberals forget their principles and 
the Tories remember their friends." And his 
conversation was built up out of similar stuff. 
He possessed that pretty mordancy that flicks 
conversation along like a tennis-ball. England 
could not understand and even Ireland, alive 
to genius, had not fully appreciated this por- 
tent in the unimaginative ranks of the party. 
The Irish party is too clever or is understood 
to be too clever for the English parties, but 
Kettle was too clever for the Irish party. His 
cleverness was a little too much out of the 
ordinary, and he was given a pedestal, but 
equally a dead weight to his winged feet in the 
professorship of economics at the new Univer- 
sity of Ireland. But the "dismal science" was 
not dismal in his keeping. In intellectual Dub- 



THE KILLING OF KETTLE 97 

lin he came into his own. It was becoming 
more and more the resurgent capital of the 
country at that time. By right of intellect 
Dublin was asserting that position which in 
political fact she did not possess. Shortly be- 
fore the outbreak of the war it was possible to 
spend a morning at St. Enda's School and dis- 
cuss the ideals of Irish education with Pearse 
and MacDonagh, to catch a vivid minute with 
George Russell in Plunkett House, in the after- 
noon to see Yeats and Lady Gregory moving 
down the quays to a rehearsal at the Abbey 
Theatre, and in the evening to hear a Synge 
play and pass a late hour with Kettle. An 
ambrosian night and day. 

Kettle soon formed a circle in which young 
men sharpened their wits or darkened their 
philosophies. For he was one of those terrible 
pessimists, who are always saying dark sayings 
in an illuminating way. He was most upset- 
ting in his constructive moments and vice 
versa. On the whole he was the greatest loss 
in his time endured by the intelligentia of Ire- 
land. 

He seemed destined to fulfil a vital but never 
quite attainable part in Irish life, to reconcile 
the old generation of Parliamentarians with the 
new Ireland which had arisen to demand bet- 



98 THE IRISH ISSUE 

ter things. His father, Andrew Kettle, was 
one of the veterans of the Parnellite movement, 
and his friends were the Young Irelanders, who 
were already breaking in sympathy with the 
Irish party. He alone could have wrought a 
reconciliation and possibly averted the terrible 
revolt which buried so much promise in the 
ruins of Dublin. He was early aware of the 
restiveness of the young men and of the neces- 
sity of supplying them with a place in the 
National movement before they chose one for 
themselves. He became the first president of 
the "Young Ireland" branch of the United 
Irish League, a brave attempt to avert the im- 
pending destiny. Again he was chairman of 
the committee, which endeavoured to establish 
peace during the great Dublin strike, and once 
more found himself treading between the very 
meshes of Fate, for the unsettled strike proved 
to be the seed of the rising. He was trying 
to bring together threads that the Inexorable 
Shears had already divided. 

Release from Parliament afforded him further 
leisure for literature, for which we may be 
thankful. We have only his words now, 
whether in prose or verse, to remember him 
by. But his poems have a different ring to 
that we usually associate with the Green Muse. 



THE KILLING OF KETTLE 99 

There was a tenderness and a deep sentiment 
in all that he wrote, though his wine was stirred 
with an iron spoon and his pen distilled a drop 
of gall on the sweet froth. As a professional 
pessimist and amateur optimist he probed 
depths and pricked superficialities in a way 
that was disturbing to the ordinary reader. 
Themes of doom and the vagaries of disaster 
pursued him as one who was not unglad of 
them. Tragedy he could endure but not ennui. 
He had come to the conclusion that the twenti- 
eth century, " which cuts such a fine figure in 
encyclopaedias is most familiarly known to the 
majority of its children as a new kind of head- 
ache." Nevertheless as an Irishman he was 
always true to the sacred and ever-failing cause 
of Utopia. He was hopeful that as Ireland was 
a country, where the unexpected invariably 
happened, that something really good might 
occur. And he wrote: "That a wise man soon 
grows disillusioned of disillusionment. Cyni- 
cism is in life the last treachery." 

He was always fighting for lost causes, but 
he was never at a loss in thought or speech. 
He had a wonderful gift of spontaneity. He 
could always say something that was already 
unexpressed in the minds of others. He took 
the political platform with a serious apprecia- 



100 THE IRISH ISSUE 

tion of the wit of his hillside constituents. He 
could be sarcastic, ironic, amusing, and com- 
plimentary by turns. Once he was met by a 
poor populace who had improvised a mountain 
band and some home-made torches of turf and 
paraffin. "Friends," quoth Kettle, "you have 
met us with God's two best gifts to man, fire 
and music !" What more could be asked ? It 
was as instantaneous as graceful. 

In political balladry he could not be beaten. 
He replied to the Jingo effusions with which 
Kipling and Watson stepped into the Irish 
arena with an amusing sarcasm. He ridiculed 
Kipling for trying to put the sunrise out with 
"a bucketful of Boyne." But a savage in- 
dignation could tear his breast, and nothing 
equalled his outburst when he compared Dub- 
lin's torchlight reception of Asquith with the 
last days of Parnell: 

"As you filled your streets with your comic Pentecost 
And the little English went by and the lights grew dim, 
We dumb in the shouting crowd, we thought of Him!" 

Only Kettle could have divined a "comic Pen- 
tecost" in that orgy of tongues and torches. 
The war came, and Kettle took the point of 
view not of the Britisher or the Sinn Feiner, 
but of the European. He immediately stated: 



THE KILLING OF KETTLE 101 

France is right now as she was wrong in 1870. England is 
right now as she was wrong in the Boer War. Russia is right 
now as she was wrong on Bloody Sunday. 

The interest of Kettle was that he was an 
international Nationalist, which is as rare in 
Ireland as elsewhere. Much as he loved Ire- 
land he also appreciated Europe, and he would 
not willingly allow western civilisation to be 
twisted from its hinges without some protest be- 
ing made by Irishmen. Six years before the war 
he had laid down: "My only programme for 
Ireland consists in equal parts of Home Rule 
and the Ten Commandments. My only coun- 
sel to Ireland is that to become deeply Irish she 
must become European." 

Young Ireland did not follow him into the 
trenches, but he never felt he had made a mis- 
take. Yet his heart never left those who had 
followed other counsels than his. He appeared 
to give evidence in favour of John McNeill 
at his court martial, and his last request from 
France before he fell was a plea to release the 
prisoners of Easter week. Out of the shadow 
of death he cried: 

In the name, and by the seal, of the blood given in the last 
two years I ask for Colonial Home Rule for Ireland, a thing 
essential in itself, and essential as a prologue to the recon- 
struction of the Empire. Ulster will agree. 



102 THE IRISH ISSUE 

And I ask for the immediate withdrawal of martial law in 
Ireland, and an amnesty for all Sinn Fein prisoners. If this 
war has taught us anything it is that great things can be done 
only in a great way. 

He died and the prisoners were set at liberty. 
Many of them had bitterly maligned him as a 
platform soldier. He could always have had 
an appointment on a staff or at the base, but 
he insisted on his due and decent wage of 
death. Like Willie Redmond later, he must 
have felt that a time had come to die, when 
the angry and mocking cries of his own people 
reached them overseas. Bravely they both 
died and perhaps with a smile of bitterness at 
the end, as men encompassed by the treachery 
of their high doom, but whatever bitterness 
they felt they kept for themselves, and their 
smile was for the Ireland out of whose earth 
they were to lie. 

Kettle must have suffered terribly between 
the Dublin rising and his death. The mur- 
dered Sheehy Skefrmgton was his brother-in- 
law. Others of the executed were his friends. 
To his sensitive nature death in France must 
have seemed sweeter than continuing to live in 
Dublin of haunted and unhappy memory for 
all his generation at least. From the atmos- 
phere of intrigue, meanness, and misery he 



THE KILLING OF KETTLE 103 

was doubtless not sorry to get away into the 
cleaner winds of war. He died for no imperi- 
alist concept, for no fatuous jingoism. Politics 
and all the shams and disappointments of life 
had slipped from his lithe soul. He had put 
away small things and his last and death-wrung 
demand was that great things should be done 
in a great way in Ireland. The failure of the 
little ways had proved so complete. He did 
not resent the littleness that had dogged his 
life and left him lonely at the last, but he re- 
called and hated the pettiness and duplicity 
that had injured Ireland, that had fooled her 
leaders and led out her children on false prom- 
ises. Out of the greatness of war he asked 
for that touch of greatness by which alone great 
things are achieved. Like a thousand ardent 
spirits in Ireland at the time he had been 
ready to leap to a new era by the bridge of 
great things greatly done, even if the bridge 
was to be the bridge of death. 

Disappointed but undismayed, Kettle stood 
with nought but a mystic's dream between him 
and the great horror. He felt afraid for Ire- 
land but not for himself. Then indeed the 
irony of his life and the bitterness of it all 
must have come home to him. Stripped of 
all, his career, his chair, his ambitions, his 



104 THE IRISH ISSUE 

friends and his lovers, with his back turned to 
Ireland and his heart turned from England, he 
threw himself over the mighty gulf, where at 
least he could be sure that all things good or 
evil were on the great scale that his soul re- 
quired. With earth's littlenesses he was done. 
So amid the wreckage of a world and the 
carnage of a continent fell Tom Kettle. Many 
when they heard that tragic news all over that 
Irish world, on which the sun never sets, must 
have remembered the grief of Gavan Duffy 
when confronted by the death of Thomas Davis 
in his prime. Ireland has never ceased to be 
haunted by the promise, the pathos, and the 
possibility of that life and death, and now men 
will look back on Kettle likewise. Irishmen 
will think of him with his gentle brother-in-law, 
Sheehy Skeffington, as two intellectuals, who 
after their manner and their light wrought and 
thought and died for Ireland. What boots it 
if one was murdered by a British officer and the 
other was slain in honourable warfare by Ger- 
mans ? To Ireland they are both lovable and 
in Irish mind their memory shall not fail. 
What though Skeffington sleeps nigh Parnell 
and O'Connell in holy Glasnevin, while Kettle's 
ashes are left in the shell-torn trenches of 
France? Ireland knows that they were both 



THE KILLING OF KETTLE 105 

men of peace and that they both offered their 
lives for her. In death they were divided, but 
in the heart of Ireland they are as one. 

There is a beautiful picture by Burne-Jones 
of the knight who met and yet forgave his 
worst enemy. As he turned aside he knelt 
before a wooden crucifix of the wayside, and 
the figure on the cross bent to kiss him. Who 
can doubt that Kettle, who had forgiven the 
English, who had murdered his brother, and 
went to France to defend the homes of English- 
women from outrage and sudden death — that 
as he passed some village Calvary he was not 
suffered to pass comfortless upon his way. 



VIII 

CARSON AND CASEMENT 

No pair of Irish names have been more cir- 
culated, contrasted, and queried than those of 
Carson and Casement. For months in the past 
and now probably for years in the future the 
politician will batten on their antithesis and 
the pamphleteer parade the iniquity of the one 
or the righteousness of the other, as he may 
happen to view them. The capital to be made 
out of their exploits is tempting to the partisan 
but of doubtful interest to their country. How 
long is Ireland to be forced to bandy their 
names as catchwords? 

No more considerable omen of good-will and 
common sense could have been found in the 
Dublin convention than the omission of both 
names from the list of members. It was as 
well, for their names are as firebrands and their 
memories make men see red. For obvious 
reasons neither was invited to the gathering. 
Since their military escapades on Irish soil one 
has gone into the next world, while the other 

106 



CARSON AND CASEMENT 107 

went Into the next Cabinet. To all practical 
purpose it is to be hoped that both have passed 
for ever from the Irish scene, leaving only the 
wake and wash of the tragic parts each tried 
to essay gradually to settle. Their careers are 
already legendary and their names symbols. 
Let them both be as ghosts and their future 
influences as phantasmata vainly crying out 
of the past. Neither could have appeared at 
the Dublin convention except in the guise of a 
veritable spectre at the feast of good-will. All 
that is moderate and fair-minded in Ireland has 
decided to leave their achievements with the 
dead, no longer to return and plague the living. 
The time is approaching when historians 
must take the place of journalists and deal 
with Irish reputations as frigidly and impar- 
tially as the officials of a German corpse-sta- 
tion deal with their callous duties. At present 
both Carson and Casement hang in the glim- 
mer of a pseudo-apotheosis, Carson as the in- 
carnate and incomparable soul of Ulster, and 
Casement as the martyr of a race of which, 
indeed, the majority had not heard his name 
before his arrest. The popular view of both 
is probably mistaken. Neither really repre- 
sented what they believed themselves to repre- 
sent. Casement was an Ulsterman and the 



108 THE IRISH ISSUE 

exact type of adventurous and quixotic official 
that turns up in English bureaucracy, suffi- 
ciently to persuade most foreigners that all 
Englishmen are insane. Carson was also an 
adventurer, but a Galway boy, who only took 
up the Orange cause as Casement took up 
Fenianism late in life. Each had already made 
his reputation and very good reputations, one 
at the bar and the other in the consular service. 
But the Irish casino tempted them and both 
set out to play for exceedingly great stakes. 

Though history will probably decide that 
each lost, they acquired a world-wide notoriety, 
composed for them equally by the execration 
and adulation of the press. In America Carson 
is thought of as the cold, lantern-jawed Junker, 
whose power and pull enabled him to import 
arms into Ulster without incurring any more 
serious consequences than being caged in the 
Cabinet, while Casement is arrayed as the fer- 
vid Celt who followed his example, but was 
arrested and hung before he could get a single 
gun into Ireland. 

Cool students of Irish history will not see 
much difference between them as conspirators, 
except that one was wholly disastrous to him- 
self, while the other came near to being disas- 
trous to his whole country. To Irishmen their 



CARSON AND CASEMENT 109 

actions were not incomprehensible. Each of 
them was in his way playing the great game 
that never ends on Irish soil. The game that 
is never won, but fascinates its players. They 
made themselves the pivots of ancestral pas- 
sions and immemorial hatreds, and as pivots 
they were responsible for automatically un- 
loosening fatalities that proved beyond their 
control. 

The civilised world was amazed and amused 
when Carson armed his followers. The Na- 
tionalists were not shocked, for they knew he 
was playing for high stakes, and they rather 
admired the chances he had taken in such 
devil-care fashion. If it had been for his coun- 
try that he was acting and not for the sake 
of a broken-down English party he would have 
become a national hero. Even so, the Fenians 
bless his name for having made it possible for 
them to acquire the munitions and induce the 
conditions that made the Dublin revolt. 
felix culpa! 

Some of them it is believed even assisted his 
gun-running in the hope of trouble. They 
knew that he was taking up two-edged weap- 
ons, and that he was sowing a wind that might 
just as easily whirl him away as Redmond or 
themselves. Time has shown that they were 



110 THE IRISH ISSUE 

correct. The interest taken in his exploit was 
not confined to Ireland or America. The 
Kaiser seems to have thought it worth while 
at one time to obtain a first-hand account of 
Ulster. A little flattery doubtless drew as 
much as he wanted to know, unless Carson was 
shrewder than the Kaiser. It would be inter- 
esting to know the secret diagnoses under which 
Carson and Casement were ticketed in the 
German archives. No doubt each man was 
appraised at his exact value to the German 
calculations. Each was watched and followed 
all those months, for neither side can have been 
quite certain of Casement until his execution, 
and each in his blindfold, impetuous way played 
the game Germany hoped of them. Which 
served Germany best or worst the calculators 
of history will have to decide. Casement no 
doubt served Germany in bringing about direct 
relations between the Irish- Americans and Ber- 
lin, but his failure to recruit Irishmen for the 
German army made them glad to get rid of 
him. He was thwarted in his attempt to post- 
pone the rising, but his direct arrival from 
Germany obscured the sympathy which would 
have met the Sinn Fein in a world becoming 
more and more suspicious and intolerant of 
German schemes. 



CARSON AND CASEMENT 111 

Carson and his friends would seem to have 
played into the hands of the German staff in 
underlining the unique opportunity of entering 
a war in which England would be too occupied 
at home to engage. As John Quinn wrote 
from America: 

Carson, Smith and the English Tories who backed them are 
more responsible for this war than any other body of men in 
the world except the German General Staff. That is the be- 
lief of people in this country generally. 

On the other hand, the German staff can 
never be sufficiently ungrateful to the same for 
having unconsciously lured them into a disas- 
trous war. And as it was probably the world's 
last chance to smash Prussianism, the score 
may stand quits. The most the historian can 
aver is that Carson made it as tempting to the 
Germans to go to war as he later made it diffi- 
cult for America to enter earlier than she did. 

Casement's tragedy is still obscured in mys- 
tery. His play was more difficult and daring 
than that of Carson, and it led to death with- 
out at any moment admitting a gleam of suc- 
cess. The most he could have staked his ac- 
tion upon was that Germany would win the 
war. His whole career had been eccentric and 
brilliant. As far as it has ever been achieved, 



112 THE IRISH ISSUE 

he associated the British consular service, which 
is a dummy diplomacy, with genius. He 
dropped into it by accident, remained in it out 
of chivalrous purposes, and passed out of it not 
into retirement but into a frantic attempt to 
adjust the Irish problem by one fell deed. 

His life, if it is ever told, will be no unin- 
teresting one. Some early trouble sent him to 
sea and as a young man he served as a purser 
on the South African Line. In this capacity he 
was picked up by Sir Claude MacDonnell and 
made a roving commissioner in the Oil Rivers. 
Here he developed unusual capacities in deal- 
ing with the natives, and made a number of 
treaties which are still in existence. He entered 
to an extraordinary degree into native thought 
and was always as much at pains to help and 
elevate the protected as to establish the pres- 
tige of the protector. At times he would dis- 
appear from civilisation and be absorbed in the 
Dark Continent. He received appointments at 
Lorenzo Marques and in the Congo. There he 
threw himself into the work of inquiry and 
denunciation. In doing so he had to forfeit 
the friendship of Leopold, King of the Belgians, 
the same monarch who had wished to employ 
Gordon in his Congo scheme. Gordon and 
Casement had many points in common. Each 



CARSON AND CASEMENT 113 

was a religious mystic and far more interested 
in religious work than imperialism. At one 
time Casement seemed on the point of throwing 
up his position for missionary endeavour. Like 
Gordon he acquired his ascendancy over the 
native by his detachment from wealth and 
women. Like Gordon he was intractable to 
his superiors and believed in a vaguely inspired 
mission. He had an itch for fomenting official 
troubles with the highest and noblest aims in 
view. He was a perpetual crusader on behalf 
of the under dog, wherever and of whatever 
colour he found him. Had he died in Africa 
he would have left a legend that would be cher- 
ished by Englishmen to-day. "Congo" Case- 
ment would be mentioned in a breath with 
"Chinese" Gordon, England's martyrs in Af- 
rica. It is very curious that each took up one 
very hoary and evil cause in utter blindness 
of what it meant. Gordon's military reputa- 
tion was gained in upholding the dead hand of 
the Manchus, and Casement by an even more 
fantastic step passed over to the Germany, 
whose methods among the natives he had had 
sufficient cause to detest. 

Casement only went on the Irish platform 
in the year before the outbreak of war. Then 
it was to declare that "There is only one Ire- 



114 THE IRISH ISSUE 

land, one a*nd indivisible. And the more we 
love Ulster the more surely we should love 
that greater Ireland that owns us all." 

To his love of Ireland was added that fatal 
sense of thwarted achievement, which has em- 
bittered so many Irish careers. When the 
Cunard liners left Queenstown out of their call, 
Casement negotiated for the Hamburg-Ameri- 
can Line to take their place, but he was under- 
cut by a move from the British Foreign Office. 
Henceforth the path to German intrigue was 
easy and he set himself among those who were 
trying to wean the American sympathies occu- 
pied by England to Germany. He claimed that 
England was doing just what it is apparent 
that Germany was. "Every tool of her di- 
plomacy, polished and unpolished, from the 
trained envoy to the minor poet has been tried 
in turn." 

In Germany he took the disastrous step of 
trying to enlist Irish prisoners in an Irish regi- 
ment for the Kaiser. This and the alleged 
ill-treatment, which befell the Irish prisoners 
who refused his proffer, led to his execution. 
Everything repeats itself in Irish history, and 
it is curious to read in the diary of Captain 
Milman, who was taken prisoner in the Penin- 
sular War, as follows: 



CARSON AND CASEMENT 115 

Burgos 1809. A sergeant of the Irish Brigade who had 
belonged to our 50th and deserted, an Irishman by birth, 
came into the prison to drink with a parcel of soldiers' wives 
and wanted to enlist the prisoners into the French service. 

Passing from cold facts one is bound to re- 
cord Casement's solemn assertion that he was 
not responsible for any ill-treatment to those 
who refused his offer. Nevertheless the two 
Irish prisoners who were shot were not less 
martyrs than he. It has always been Ireland's 
fate to tempt those who love her most into 
disaster nethermost. On this occasion it seems 
possible to say in the words of Shakespeare's 
"Cymbeline" that she 

"let her beauty 
look through a casement to allure false hearts." 

His action in going to Germany was dictated 
more by despair at the plight of the Irish cause 
than by desire of German triumph. In a letter 
to John Quinn from Germany he wrote: 

I should have thought it was abundantly clear that I was not 
acting for Germany but for Ireland. No action of mine since 
I arrived in Europe has been an act for Germany, any more 
than, say, to cite a very notable case, Wolfe Tone acted for 
France when he tried to get French help for Ireland in a pre- 
vious great Continental war. 



116 THE IRISH ISSUE 

Casement cannot be called a lunatic. He 
was suffering from one overwhelming and ab- 
sorbing idea, on which his mind was not only 
truly and terribly set, but even racked. He 
felt that an injustice had been committed 
against Ireland by political sleight of hand. 
He felt that Ireland had been side-tracked to 
her annihilation as a political entity, for he 
was accurately informed of Germany's power 
to resist and crush any small nations thrown 
in her track. He determined to forestall any 
possible invasion of Ireland by obtaining a 
declaration of German good behaviour should 
troops ever reach the country. It was as safe 
a declaration for the German Foreign Office to 
make as one promising immunity to the public 
buildings in Nova Zembla. What is not known 
is whether the German War Office made any 
illusionary promise to send troops to fight for 
an Irish republic. On the whole the Dublin 
rising seems to have been only vaguely con- 
nected with any direct German plan. It would 
have taken place under the circumstances, any- 
how. If there was a bargain, which heaven 
forbid, it was a very unequal one. The Sinn 
Feiners risked and gave everything. The Ger- 
mans only jeopardised a tubful of old Russian 
rifles. Casement was literally marooned with 



CARSON AND CASEMENT 117 

a handful of men. American friends, aware 
that he was sick, were anxious that he should 
be retained in Germany until the end of the 
war. There is some reason to believe that he 
intended to postpone the rising, but was de- 
layed by premeditated repairs and delays to 
the submarine in which he had embarked. 
Neither the German nor English authorities 
allowed him to communicate in time with the 
Sinn Feiners. The rest is history. It was not 
for the defence of the realm so much as to 
afford a Berlin holiday that the subsequent 
executions took place. 

Casement had foreseen and welcomed his 
death. He was given the opportunity of play- 
ing his part to the bitter end. In order to call 
world attention to the Irish question he had 
passed out of his way, out of his peace, out of 
his retirement, out of his rank, out of his coun- 
try, and out of his life. Against such Quixotes 
no bribery, no persuasion can avail. He had 
lived his ideal of Wolfe Tone as far as it could 
be lived under modern conditions. With de- 
liberate haste and wilful ecstasy he threw him- 
self into the seething pot on the chance of stir- 
ring up an eddy, and he fell straight to the 
bottom of the boiling broth. Leagued only 
with his own desperation, he attempted the 



118 THE IRISH ISSUE 

impossible and bearded the great Power he had 
long contemplated in his dreams as a Cartha- 
ginian might have seen the Roman Empire. 
When he wrote the strange lines: 

"Eagle of Eryx ! when the iEgatian shoal 
Rolled westward all the hopes that Hamio wrecked, 
With mighty wing unwearying, didst thou 
Seek far beyond the wolf's grim protocol, 
Within the Iberian sunset faintly specked 
A rock where Punic faith should bide its vow" — 

was he thinking of the rock above Cave Hill, 
where Tone made his vow to free Ireland? 
Was the wolf's grim protocol the British Em- 
pire ? Was it a Hibernian sunset clothed with 
sanguine ruin against which he saw himself 
faintly specked ? It is a poem which lends it- 
self to the mystic interpretation of Casement, 
which is only charitable when his political one 
is condemned. 



Part II 



IX 

THE WINNING OF THE UNITED STATES 

To many, not excluding herself, America has 
shown herself an unfathomable problem. Es- 
pecially has it been so during the Great War, 
when reliable guides were able to dispute 
whether she was pro-Ally or pro-German, and 
the only destiny that the majority of her chil- 
dren could agree upon was that she had no des- 
tiny, at least no destiny that would make her 
partner or decider in the European debacle. 
To herself she was the great unworried, un- 
wearied, unwarrior country, desiring nothing 
better than that her hemisphere should remain 
hermetical in the name of Mr. Monroe. To 
her enemies she seemed a comedy, but to her 
friends it was always America's tragedy that 
she had no tragedy. 

But the Americanism which so passionately 

demanded that America should be passive, 

neutral, and static was not the Americanism of 

the people who in a century had decupled their 

original acres, who drove the aborigines before 

121 



122 THE IRISH ISSUE 

them, penetrated the country of others with 
armies, and even gave a semblance of imperial- 
ism to the American eagle. The same "mani- 
fest destiny" of the United States led her to 
subjugate the northern and to protect the 
southern continent and, in spite, of a cherished 
tradition of isolation, to dominate the Pacific 
and gradually become a world power. 

No sooner had the revolting colonies set 
adrift than they commenced to grow. Ripe 
fruit from the rotting trunk of Spain fell to 
them for the plucking. Until the Civil War 
America was a great imperial and conquering 
country. Pioneers and prophets did the work 
which traders and missionaries accomplished 
for European Powers desirous of expansion. 
Republics broke out in her path before they 
merged in her federal system. For a while 
there was a Texan republic and California was 
preceded by the Bear Flag republic. The pos- 
sibility of a Mormon republic effervesced into 
the Great Salt Lake. All the while the Ameri- 
can was advancing and driving remorselessly 
the Indian and the bison, the Spaniard and the 
elk before him. He pulled down equally the 
Spanish and British flags. Jackson hung Brit- 
ish subjects in Florida, Pike of Pike's Peak fell 
trying to snatch Toronto from Canada. Mex- 



'WINNING THE UNITED STATES 123 

ico was pierced to the gates of her capital and 
the Pacific slope wrested from her control. 
The great annexations were made in obedience 
to the law that the United States could not be 
hemmed in from their natural outlets. The 
States are organic and not static. The Civil 
War came as a great setback during which the 
red man gathered his breath and the French 
were able to enter Mexico. 

While enjoying expansion on her own lines, 
America remained, thanks to the Monroe Doc- 
trine, immune from the expansion of others. 
On the one hand, she was determined that no 
European foothold should be allowed in the 
new hemisphere, and on the other hand she 
had isolated herself from all such far-off un- 
happy things as European wars. Yet in the 
fulness of time it was the former doctrine that 
brought her intervention in the latter. Politi- 
cal withdrawal from the planet proved impossi- 
ble, owing to the Monroe Doctrine itself, which 
implied not only rights in one hemisphere but 
responsibilities towards another. 

The Monroe Doctrine was not merely an 
anti-British or anti-Spanish policy, blocking 
their ways in the New World. It made Amer- 
ica responsible for the freedom of Cuba and for 
meeting any European menace to the American 



124 THE IRISH ISSUE 

hemisphere in advance. It was from a devel- 
opment of the same doctrine that America left 
her moorings at one time to wage war with 
Spain, and on another to become an ally of 
England against Germany. Monroe had fore- 
seen the time when England would have to take 
her place with the monarchs of Europe or with 
the American republic, with despotism or with 
liberty. By a fortuitous inspiration England 
had approved the birth of the Monroe Doc- 
trine. Though German aggression was un- 
dreamt of at the time, Monroe had started the 
train of events which was one day to confront 
America, also, with the choice of siding with 
despotism or liberty. During the Great War 
the United Kingdoms and the United States 
became allies. During the century of peace 
between the Treaty of Ghent and the out- 
break of war in 1914 they had never been 
united. Whether the military co-operation 
brought about by the high-handed conduct of 
Germany will form the basis of a permanent 
entente, one in many ways vital to the world 
of democracy, remains to be seen. For the 
present the Anglo-Saxon schism is healed and 
it is interesting to recall the historical trend 
by which with many deviations the two com- 
munities, whom Mr. Wilson has now joined 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 125 

together, have been so long making their 
way. 

In British eyes the United States represent 
the lost tribes, the political irredenti of the 
Anglo-Saxon, but which, like the territory lost 
to the French and Spanish in the New World, 
eschewed the idea of any union with the mother 
country. England has several times in hei» 
history had to relinquish conquered country, 
but only once her own colonised offspring, 
earth of her earth, blood of her blood, in the 
New England colonies. She lost them because 
her bonds were selfish and commercial instead 
of being sentimental and maternal. Only the 
most colossal ideal could ever rebridge the 
chasm. Only an England equally remote from 
Georgian imperialism and greed and contemp- 
tuous of Victorian commercialism could ap- 
proach the great statue of liberty at the gates 
of America in the proper spirit of reconciliation, 
for the statue is as much a symbol of the na- 
tional religion as one of the deified abstractions 
of the Roman world. Great is Liberty of the 
Americans ! 

The American Revolution taught England 
to study the rights of her own settlements, but 
the lesson was only learnt at a price, for the 
unity of the English-speaking world had passed 



126 THE IRISH ISSUE 

away. In vain the growing empire proceeded 
to gather the ends of the world into its lap and 
to add the tropics to the arctics. In vain 
seemingly were great imperial growths and 
federations forced or fostered in India, Aus- 
tralia, and South Africa. The American col- 
onies into which the adventurous heart-blood 
of England, Scotland, and Ireland had been at 
different times poured remained aloof, es- 
tranged from what they denied had been a 
mother country and to which they became sar- 
castic, contemptuous, and bitterly hostile. In 
his gigantic stride to possess himself of the 
earth the Anglo-Saxon had fallen asunder. 
Ambitions good or evil are liable to overreach 
themselves, and in taking Canada from France 
England laid the train which was to lose 
her the New England colonies, whose loyalty 
would otherwise have been strengthened by 
a jealous French neighbour, just as Asiatic 
pressure strengthens that of New South Wales. 
But when Canada was conquered the necessity 
of defence in New England was replaced by a 
possibility of defiance. The Revolution came, 
but after the Anglo-Saxon rather than French 
pattern. It was not intellectual or doctrinaire, 
but practical, with a sober religious motive 
thrown in. The Quebec Act practically estab- 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 127 

fishing Catholicism in Canada, filled the Puri- 
tan colonies with fear lest Catholic or Anglican 
prelates might be set over them. In revolu- 
tionary New England the anti-British and anti- 
Catholic sentiment coalesced. A century later, 
owing to the Irish immigration, the anti-British 
feeling was largely Catholic. The colonial dis- 
like of Catholicism was neutralised by a rebel 
contingent from Canada and by the coming of 
the French. But the French Revolution was 
more appreciated by American Ulstermen than 
by French-Canadians. The Fathers of Amer- 
ica made practical liberty rather than theoreti- 
cal reason their goddess. The French Revolu- 
tion bred an empire which perished by snow 
and fire in Muscovy. The American counter- 
part created a republic which came to stretch 
from the fiery plains of Texas to the snows of 
Alaska, and to prove one of the few enduring 
institutions upon this earth. 

The United States immediately began to 
breed the transatlantic type of the white race, 
so continually misunderstood and unappreci- 
ated by Englishmen. The new American, po- 
litically republican and racially aristocratic, 
was the most promising type on earth. The 
awe and reverence of the Puritan refugee, com- 
bined with the audacity and daring of the 



128 THE IRISH ISSUE 

younger son in his blood, and both the traits 
may be traced in American psychology to-day. 
Some kind of a super-Anglo-Saxon seemed to 
loom on the horizon of the virgin continent. 
But this dream of the ethnologist was cut short 
by the Civil War between North and South 
and by the unrestricted arrival of other types 
of emigrant. It was a dream which is reflected 
in the kinder caricatures of "Uncle Sam." The 
wiry-limbed awkward giant, with blue eyes and 
a light goatee, for whom bewildered visitors 
vainly search the New York streets, was once 
a predominant type. Hardy and magnificently 
uncultured, it was he who tore up colonial 
tyranny, broke the Hessian hirelings, won the 
naval war of 1812 on points and largely suc- 
cumbed during the ghastly epic of the Civil 
War. 

Cobbett, on his ridiculous mission to fetch 
Tom Paine's bones from America, remarked: 
"This country of the best and boldest of sea- 
men and of the most moral and happy people 
in the world, is also the home of the tallest and 
ablest-bodied men in the world." And during 
the Civil War Meredith was alert enough to 
comment on the Yankee generals: "They are 
of a peculiarly fine cast and show the qualities 
of energy and skill and also race. They are 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 129 

by no means vulgar. Place our best men, 
headed by the (German) Duke of Cambridge 
alongside them and start." 

Though his stock in trade was a continent, 
Uncle Sam had to make his way in the world, 
for he was without friends. His assets were 
a republican idealism taken from France, a 
knowledge of seamanship and an aptitude for 
exploration inherited from England, and a 
visionary connection with Ireland, which made 
that admiring island an early and spontaneous 
contributor to filling his waste places. The 
American took to hard work and scant liveli- 
hood, and nevertheless worked out a culture 
of his own. In certain stages the straight 
American seems to have been pretty aggravat- 
ing to the European, but at his best he produced 
the type which merited the celebrated descrip- 
tion as one that "could calculate an eclipse, 
survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, 
try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet, 
and play the violin." 

Though the United States started with a 
bitter family grudge against England, the forms 
of law, religion, and politics remained Anglo- 
Saxon under their republican husk. Talley- 
rand used to say that, notwithstanding the aid 
of France, England was the natural ally of 



ISO THE IRISH ISSUE 

the United States. Distance and occupation 
for some time kept any antagonism apart. 
Each was deeply engaged, the English in a 
struggle with Napoleon, the Americans in a 
tussle with nature. In the end the Anglo- 
Saxon prevailed against both. 

But in 1812 a clash occurred. England 
found herself at death-grips with the French 
and needed sailors of the old stock. Necessity 
had made the English adopt the closed sea of 
Selden, while the Americans upheld the free- 
dom of the seas of Grotius. England claimed 
the right of search and impressed some two 
thousand American seamen, some out of the 
best families, into her ships. It was true that 
deserters often concealed themselves under 
false papers, but more often real Americans 
were flagrantly kidnapped under false pre- 
tences. The Americans were without redress 
until they fitted out frigates capable of winning 
some of the most famous duels in naval history. 
The English Orders in Council were revoked, 
but not in time to avert war. It is a curious 
fact that had the electric cable been in existence 
it would have prevented war in 1812, as surely 
as it would have precipitated it between Eng- 
land and America in 1862. 

As to the war, every American schoolboy 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 131 

knows how Decatur riddled the Macedonian, 
and how the Constitution sank the Guerriere. 
English schoolboys only remember the exploit 
by which Captain Broke of the Shannon de- 
stroyed the Chesapeake off Boston, although 

"The people of the port 
Came out to see the sport 
With the music playing Yankee-doodle-dandy-oh!" 

which most Britishers still believe to be the 
American national anthem. The American 
frigates, like the yachts of later day, challenged 
the mother country and more than carried off 
the naval honours. The Anglo-Saxon, after 
littering the sea with Spanish, Dutch, and 
French wreckage, was hoist by his own petard, 
whipped at sea by his own whelps. If many 
American citizens were serving impressed on 
English ships, Decatur had old tars of Nelson 
on his. The last English survivor of these sea 
duels died so lately as in 1892. One of the 
most successful of the American commanders 
was Commodore Stewart, the grandfather of 
Parnell. If the war did not quench bitterness, 
it evoked a mutual respect. Henceforth Eng- 
lish sea-captains had to admit an equality of 
quality. On land the English were successful 
in taking the capital, and an Irish family added 



132 THE IRISH ISSUE 

the Bladensburg victory to their name; but at 
New Orleans the victory went to the Americans 
also under Scotch-Irish leadership. The Treaty 
of Ghent initiated the peace between the two 
countries. It was interesting that an Adams 
sat on each side of the table. English states- 
men were to learn respect for that shrewd but 
courteous family, old-fashioned heralds of the 
future, who faced them in each Anglo-American 
crisis. England, with Waterloo on the horizon, 
soon forgot the war; but for two generations 
the ogre of American nurseries remained the 
hated "Britisher." American nationalism de- 
veloped a violent hue against the background 
of British rivalry. Madison was the last Presi- 
dent to be actually at war with England. 
Monroe, his successor, devised a far subtler 
weapon against European interference, the 
Monroe Doctrine. Originally shafted at a 
hint from Canning against Spain, it was in 
coming time to check England herself — an 
arrow tipped with her own feathers. Though 
English statesmen would only consider it "the 
dictum of its distinguished author," and Lord 
Salisbury was to deny its international legality, 
the doctrine has proved stronger than the 
sword. At the time Brougham declared that 
"No event has dispersed greater joy, exulta- 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 133 

tion and gratitude over all the freemen of 
Europe." It saved South America from the 
"holy alliance" of Romanoff, Hapsburg, and 
Hohenzollern. 

Henceforth there were to be bitternesses 
enough, disputes many, threatenings some; but 
bloodshed never again. The Monroe Doctrine 
was the pledge. However popular and politi- 
cal it was to "twist the lion's tail," there re- 
mained a subconscious reservation against war. 
Mill gave it expression, "A war between Great 
Britain and the United States would give a 
new lease to tyranny and bigotry wherever 
they exist and would throw back the progress 
of mankind for generations" — a corollary to 
the dictum of Monroe ! If a common tongue 
was a constant adjuration against war, it was 
not the less provocative of quarrels. And quar- 
rels there arose in plenty about boundaries and 
ships, about seals in the Behring Sea, about 
Fenians in prison, about Oregon and Alaska — 
and even about yacht races. Every now and 
again a treaty cleared off outstanding difficul- 
ties. The Maine boundary was settled by 
treaty between Daniel Webster and Lord Ash- 
burton, but the joint occupation of Oregon 
raised a party cry of "Fifty-four-forty (lati- 
tude) or fight." Pakenham foolishly refused 



134 THE IRISH ISSUE 

President Polk's offer of the forty -ninth lati- 
tude. Secretary Buchanan entertained the 
original idea of making the Pope arbitrator as 
between two heretical governments. In the 
end Aberdeen compromised on the forty -ninth 
latitude, which gave Vancouver to England. 
Buchanan became a successful and the first 
popular minister at St. James's, though Palm- 
ers ton, the jealous foe of America, at one time 
threatened his dismissal. It was Crampton, 
however, the minister in Washington, who was 
dismissed for recruiting during the Crimean 
War — "offered as a sacrifice to the Irish vote," 
says Lord Newton in his able Life of Lyons. 
Though he had become a personal friend of 
Victoria, Buchanan returned to become Presi- 
dent. He invited the Prince of Wales to visit 
the land of his ancestors, so to speak. By 
planting a tree at Washington's grave the 
prince was believed to have buried "the last 
faint trace of discord" between the two coun- 
tries. But the Civil War, to which Buchanan's 
feeble policy to the South largely led, destroyed 
the good feeling at its best and left behind the 
resentment of a generation. 

America originally quarrelled with King and 
Tory, not with Radical and people. Liberalism 
always remained a tie between the countries. 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 135 

Catholic emancipation and Chartism were re- 
garded as complementary to Americanism. 
This accounts for the division of English opinion 
during the war, though the perplexed republic 
believed Christian civilisation was involved in 
its cause. England would not realise slavery 
was at the bottom of the war. The irony was 
that England by one of the few disinterested 
acts in history had already freed her own slaves. 
Slavery had been previously forced on the col- 
onies by the mother country, but slavery 
exacted its final retribution of blood from 
America alone. Yet Bristol had deserved the 
fate of Richmond. The North believed that 
her cause was divine, and that her legions were 
treading the wine-press of the Lord. Yet she 
met with less than sympathy from the land 
whose flag was pledged to the ethics of her 
cause. The issue was as Rhodes, the American 
historian, puts it. The South was "the only 
community of the Teutonic race which did not 
deem human slavery wrong." However, Eng- 
land practically recognised the South as a bel- 
ligerent, rather than as a rebel against a friendly 
Power, and showed a hostility to the North 
that even Lincoln's emancipation of the negro 
did not wholly remove. It was true, Lincoln 
did not interfere with slavery at the outset, 



136 THE IRISH ISSUE 

and it remained indefinitely guaranteed by 
Congress; but it was for those with eyes to 
see to be sure that slavery and the Confederacy 
must perish together. Unfortunately, Russell 
preferred to think the North was fighting for 
empire, and the South for independence; and 
Gladstone by a serious mistake declared Jeff 
Davis had created a nation. The result was 
that the friendly North became hostile, and the 
South, which had disliked England as presum- 
ably Abolitionist, reversed her feelings. 

The English aristocracies of blood and letters 
followed the politicians. Freeman began the 
History of Federalism until the "disruption of 
the United States." Carlyle thought the war 
of liberation "a smoky chimney which had 
taken fire." The surrender of Lee was felt as 
a tragic sorrow by Lord Acton. Nevertheless, 
the North had friends strong, stern, and stanch 
in England — Argyll, Whewell, Leslie Stephen, 
Milner Gibson, and chiefly John Bright, who 
smote "the devilish delusion that slavery was 
a divine institution." Lincoln pardoned a 
British privateer "as a mark of the esteem 
held by the United States for the high charac- 
ter and steady friendship of John Bright." 
It was a pity that Bright could not afterwards 
have visited America as envoy, where he was 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 137 

promised "flowers from Chicago to the sea." 
His is the only British bust to be placed in the 
White House. The religious democrat is the 
type of Englishman who has always appealed 
most deeply to the real American people — 
Bright, Shaftesbury, Gordon, or Havelock, at 
whose death in India the flags in New York 
harbour were lowered. Bright' s name still does 
service in America. The corresponding heroes 
of the North made no appeal to Englishmen 
until after their death. John Brown, whose 
soul the Northern armies invoked on the 
march, seemed a mixture of Pilgrim Father and 
mad dog, for whose ecstasy the noose made 
the best muzzle. General Grant was far from 
seeming the ideal of the Horse Guards. By 
descent "a hard Scotch pebble," with a Kelly 
grandmother, he was inexorable without bra- 
vado, and patient without complacency; but 
he looked seedy and scrubby beside the cavalier 
Lee. Lincoln was only seen in a haze of cari- 
cature. He came to the White House "a 
backwoods Jupiter," and his own knew him 
not. The genius it took America four years, 
England may be pardoned for taking forty to 
realise. She saw him only in W. H. Russell's 
descriptions, the "tall, lean, lank man," with 
"pendulous arms" and the "strange quaint 



138 THE IRISH ISSUE 

face and head covered with its thatch of wild 
republican hair." Punch caricatured him as 
Brutus, as a billiard sharp, as a card gambler, 
as a coon in the trees, as a Phoenix rising out 
of war's horrid flames. Uncouth and unedu- 
cated and unbred, Abraham Lincoln became 
the truest and the greatest of Americans. 
Walt Whitman observed that whereas "Wash- 
ington was modelled on the best Saxon and 
Franklin was essentially a noble Englishman, 
Lincoln was far less European." Europe in- 
deed underestimated him, while America has 
been trying to live up to him ever since. 

During his administration Lincoln learnt 
with lonely pain the arts of war and letters. 
The burden of the state rested on those shoul- 
ders knotted by rail-splitting. The resources 
of that mind untilled by pedantry, unfettered 
by precedent, served equally his people and 
his generals. His daily anguish he concealed 
under a mask. The quaint stories he told to 
hide his heart might be likened to the grotesques 
with which the medisevals relieved their cathe- 
drals dedicated to divine tragedy. When hu- 
mour failed him, Lincoln fell back upon mys- 
ticism. Under his tortured strength of purpose 
grew that "charity towards all with malice to 
none," from which the American soul still 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 139 

draws in its great moments. It was truly from 
Lincoln's chair, and spiritually in Lincoln's 
blood that Woodrow Wilson wrote the words 
of his address to Congress, bringing America 
into war. Far removed from the jangling bit- 
terness and overweening hatred of the present, 
seemed to speak the dead Lincoln, sacrificing 
all save honour, forgiving all save the unpar- 
donable, unswerving because deliberate, and 
remorseless because just. 

The common language has long made jour- 
nalism the dangerous and very undiplomatic 
diplomacy between the United Kingdoms and 
the United States. During the Civil War the 
London Times and the New York Herald laid 
up a harvest of hate between two peoples who 
had every intention to respect and love each 
other. Even Lincoln's Proclamation of Free- 
dom seemed to The Times only "a very sad 
document," to be answered with "a hiss of 
scorn." The English people believed the Proc- 
lamation justified the war, but there was no 
popular press to say so. Under the influence 
of press and prejudice, unthinking Englishmen 
preferred to champion the astute and aristo- 
cratic president of fortune, Jeff Davis, the 
slave-owning Anglican bishop and general, 
Leonidas Polk, and the peerless Lee, with Marl- 



140 THE IRISH ISSUE 

borough, the greatest strategist the Anglo- 
Saxon race has produced. To such men the 
Feudalists looked to prick the great bubble of 
democracy with their swords. But the English 
working men realised that the failure of the 
North would postpone their own franchise, and 
they believed in Lincoln. Idealists in Liver- 
pool and Manchester preferred to starve for 
lack of cotton than allow the Northern cause 
to be imperilled. Aristocrats all over the 
world favoured the South, Liberals the North. 
Material reasons, even cotton, "the Dagon of 
Dixie," and Davis's strongest plenipotentiary, 
did not play so great a part as class idealism. 
Lincoln sent flour up the Mersey to relieve 
distress, but his real gift to the English came 
after his death. His victory in 1865 made a 
reform bill practicable and even imperative 
two years later. The Civil War drew out its 
piteous length. The Southern chivalry and 
the Northern crusade agonised on battle-fields 
that few Englishmen have known well enough 
to name with pride or grief. At Gettysburg 
and Chickamauga, at Vicksburg and in the 
Wilderness, the North carved out the future of 
democracy. Had they not been fought and 
won America would not have been united to 
enter the war to-day. But what has Freder- 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 141 

icksburg or Shiloh meant to Englishmen? 
What happened at Appomattox — ask? Too 
late was Grant saluted as conqueror. During 
his struggle to conquer he had no sympathy 
from Palmerston's England or Napoleon the 
Third's France. But he had Sherman, who 
said "War is hell," and he had Sheridan, who 
was Charles O'Malley risen glorified. Too late 
was Lincoln recognised by England. "Is it 
nothing to you?" he might have asked visitor s. 
who came and saw and idly passed by. In 
spite of his guest's expressed Southern sympa- 
thies, he received Lord Hartington at the White 
House, but with some humour insisted on ad- 
dressing him as "Mr. Partington," serene in 
the rising tide of a democracy that no mop 
could push back. 

English and American spitfires threatened 
each other; but real trouble was not slow in 
coming at sea. The terror of the North and 
the hope of the South lay in intervention from 
Europe. The Confederacy sent envoys. To 
the delirious enthusiasm of America they were 
taken off the British Trent by a Yankee cap- 
tain, after a preliminary shot across the bows. 
Oddly enough he was claiming the right of 
search against which his country had fought 
so passionately in 1812. Fortunately there 



142 THE IRISH ISSUE 

were no Atlantic cables to precipitate an in- 
stant explosion. But England, no less moved, 
gave seven days for the return of the envoys; 
and the Guards were sent to add a Canadian 
winter to their Crimean experiences. Delane 
of The Times wrote: "The whole army, navy, 
and volunteers are mad for service in America." 
Mad indeed ! In the American Senate prayer 
was made, mentioning "foreign arrogance" to 
the Republican Jehovah. But behind the men 
of patriotic impulse wrought the men of inter- 
national character. The prince consort sof- 
tened down the draft of the English ministers, 
of Russell, "the great little man," and of 
Palmerston, "the little great man." Adams 
moved fearlessly and lonely in London. The 
pink of democratic diplomacy, he never gave 
what would have been an aristocratic war a 
chance. Bright wrote, bidding Lincoln "put 
all the fire-eaters in the wrong." Secretary 
Seward had the cunning, or the Christianity, 
to turn the official cheek by offering an Ameri- 
can port for "landing and transporting to 
Canada troops, stores, and munitions of war 
of every kind without exception or reserva- 
tion." "There will be no war unless England 
is bent on having one," said Lincoln. Brag- 
gartry at home or abroad Lincoln never an- 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 143 

swered. He was too high and remote not to 
include a wish for what was best for both Con- 
federate and Britisher in his service to his own 
people. At heart he loved the South, and he 
desired no less that England should love him. 
He could no more hate than Washington could 
lie. He used other weapons. With a wintry 
smile he let the envoys, or "white elephants," 
as he called them, proceed to Europe, where 
they continued to damage their own cause 
until further notice. 

In spite of Seward's accompanying rhetoric, 
the surrender pacified England. But the psy- 
chological mischief stayed. As Lowell wrote 
afterwards: "It is not the Alabama that is at 
the bottom of our grudge. It is the Trent that 
we quarrel about, like Percy and Glendower. 
That was like an east wind to our old wound." 
The Alabam% though fitted out in England, 
was at least an American enterprise, of which 
Americans could feel proud. But the Laird 
Rams brewed war. One was launched at Liv- 
erpool the same day that the North drove back 
Lee at Gettysburg. Leslie Stephen wrote 
wisely: "If Laird could be hanged for getting 
two great nations into a quarrel to sell his 
ships, I should be heartily glad." The Rams 
meant breaking the blockade of the South, but 



144 THE IRISH ISSUE 

the English people were innocent, unaware 
even of the fell work of individuals. The Ala- 
bama had slipped to sea, while the Queen's 
advocate was enjoying a fortuitous nervous 
breakdown. The Laird Rams would have fol- 
lowed, had not Adams mentioned with old- 
fashioned correctness to Palmerston: "It would 
be]superfluous in me to point out to your Lord- 
ship that this means war." The Rams were 
quietly passed into the British navy. Mr. 
Adams had given another right turn to the 
world's helm. The peril had passed, and an 
Anglo-American tragedy had been averted. 
But the scars remained; and Lyons reported 
the next year from Washington: "Three-quar- 
ters of the American people are eagerly longing 
for a safe opportunity of making war with 
England." But a safe opportunity, at least 
safe for the democratic future of the world, 
never came. After the war the old reverence 
for England was replaced by suspicion and an 
excusable elation. The national outlines had 
been welded. The biggest army on earth had 
taken the field. The ironclad had been born. 
Enormous damages were assessed on the Ala- 
bama, whose ghost long flitted the seas. Sum- 
ner, as a reprisal, demanded "the withdrawal 
of the British from this hemisphere." There 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 145 

was a popular cry of "Canada for the Ala- 
bama." Lord Clarendon's treaty with Minis- 
ter Johnson was thrown out by the Senate. 
The Treaty of Washington brought apology 
and arbitration. The Alabama cost England 
three million pounds, which was a very cheap 
way to discover that England and America had 
found, in arbitration, a permanent and better 
way than war. The new tendencies, however, 
involved in America intense dislike for English 
statecraft, increased influence of the Irish, who 
had paid their footing with their blood, and a 
movement towards domestic corruption as a 
reaction from the moral uplift of the war. 
The war ended nobly, so that Meredith said 
later: "Since the benignant conclusion of the 
greatest of civil wars, I have looked on the 
American people as leaders of our civilisa- 
tion." 

But reaction had followed. The South was 
not plundered, but the sense of plunder found 
a channel in pension-fraud, graft, and unscru- 
pulous finance. The noblest had perished, and 
the "carpetbagger" took his place. Peace be- 
came no less furious than war. Never again 
could Thackeray call New York a cathedral 
town, "grave, decorous, and well-read." Mili- 
tarism was applied to industrialism. Trade 



146 THE IRISH ISSUE 

only favoured the survival of the cheapest. 
Firm fought firm, and trust was reared upon 
trust until, in our day, the "malefactors of 
great wealth" sat in unseen power. Episodes 
like the impeachment of President Johnson 
and the Tweed Ring saddened the friends 
of the republic. But the country was far 
too young to become decadent. The national 
life ran sweet, noisy, and adventurous all the 
while. A new American sprang up, cosmopol- 
itan, childlike, optimistic, a quick moneymaker 
but a cheerful spender, devoid of all the big- 
otries, tolerant of the past, greedy of the pres- 
ent, sure of the future. It was the type Eng- 
lishmen inconsistently term irreverent, while 
smiling at its eager reverences offered to Old 
World objects — the type that only a Haps- 
burg or a Hohenzollern could drive into war. 
Good relations with such could be maintained 
only by treating Americans as Americans, and 
not as ex-Englishmen. Render to the Yankee 
the things that belong to the Yankee, and to 
God the things that are God's — would have 
been a wise social provision. The mistake of 
insular Englishmen has been to conceive both 
after his own image. Not without reason 
Lowell protested against "a conviction that 
whatever good there is in us is wholly English, 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 147 

when the truth is that we are worth nothing 
except so far as we have disinfected ourselves 
of Anglicism." 

Providence rather than diplomacy seemed to 
safeguard the relations of England and Amer- 
ica. A cousinly carelessness and a fraternal 
contempt prevailed. Three times was a Brit- 
ish minister to be dismissed from Washington 
for undiplomatic conduct. 

Anglo-American diplomacy has been unique 
in not needing a use of foreign tongues. Can- 
ning told Charles Bagot that "the hardest les- 
son a British minister has to learn in America 
is not what to do, but what to bear." Bagot 
concluded with Mr. Rush that agreement which 
secured a century of unarmed peace between 
Canada and the United States. On the Great 
Lakes both agreed to burn their boats of war 
behind them. The Canadian frontier remained 
a perpetual plenipotentiary of peace. As Sir 
Charles FitzPatrick recently reminded the 
lawyers of New York: "The longest frontier on 
the earth's surface has at the same time been 
the most defenceless and the most safe." But 
the early diplomatists were contemptuous. 
Relations were odd. The British minister, 
Merry, complained officially that President 
Jefferson received him "in slippers down at 



148 THE IRISH ISSUE 

the heels," and revenged himself by entertain- 
ing Tom Moore, who wrote obscene squibs 
against Jefferson from the British embassy ! 
Jackson, Pakenham, and Crampton were in- 
sulting at Washington, apparently not realising 
they were in a foreign country. Jackson 
roundly accused the government of lying and 
was sent home. Bulwer was the first to adapt 
himself to the situation, realising that English 
diplomacy had been made rather to win over 
despots than to conciliate democracies. "Di- 
plomacy here is electioneering," he wrote from 
Washington; and he achieved the success of 
the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty. The contemptu- 
ous school was followed by the pompous. The 
stately figures of Lyons, Sackville, and Paunce- 
f ote dazzled the official scene without approach- 
ing the heart of the republic. Leslie Stephen 
described the embassy in the sixties of the last 
century as "a small knot of British swells with 
no employment but that of cursing the coun- 
try from morning to night." It was obvious 
at least that they felt at home; but good rela- 
tions must have languished. A period of offi- 
cial laudation and mutual admiration followed, 
variegated by tentative arbitrations, and by 
quick exchanges on Irish points. The heyday 
of reconciliation was reached under the demo- 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 149 

cratic school initiated by Bryce. Fifty years 
before, Delane had wished a popular speech- 
maker to be sent to Washington. Bryce' s lit- 
erary tribute to the American Constitution 
marked him as more American than most 
Americans. His acceptance of a peerage 
caused a little sadness, as though they had 
lost one of themselves. America herself hon- 
oured St. James's with men of letters like 
Bancroft, Motley, and Lowell. When their 
Americanism was their chief charm, Anglicisa- 
tion must be regarded as a besetting sin. An 
American minister is liable to merge his na- 
tionality in a manner impossible to a real 
foreigner. Better, however, he should remain 
aloof than not keep a clear idea of the Ameri- 
can before English eyes. 

If English diplomatists were crude and un- 
conciliatory toward Americans, the tourists and 
travellers were worse. Writers like the Trol- 
lopes and Dickens recorded their unforgiven 
impressions. The mutual ridicule which a 
common tongue afforded reads as ridiculously 
as Matt Ward's scoffing at English factory 
chimneys for "kissing the clouds" to a genera- 
tion which has found America guilty of a little 
skyscraping herself. The burden of British 
abuse was that the Americans spat, and in 



150 THE IRISH ISSUE 

reply Scripture was seriously adduced to show 
that the Saviour had also done so! 

The history of English visiting in America 
does not afford a lesson in perfect tact or de- 
portment. It is unjust to take liberties in the 
land of liberty. American manners are based 
on good nature, not on etiquette. God's gen- 
tlemen are frequent in " God's own country." 
The Victorian frankly disliked America, and 
said so. The lionised Dickens offended her 
mortally. Thackeray, also a success as a lec- 
turer, wisely promised to write no American 
Notes, reserving his satire for the Georges. 
He reached the wise conclusion that "the great 
point to ding into the ears of the great, stupid, 
virtue-proud English public is that there are 
folks as good as they in America." As lec- 
turers Matthew Arnold was inaudible and Free- 
man unintelligible. The Stanleys, both the 
explorer and the dean, were a success. The 
dean's eulogium of the Anglican divine, Hooker, 
was taken as a shrewd compliment to "fighting 
Joe Hooker," a popular general. Froude was 
mischievous enough to attack the Irish in a 
series of lectures, which were no less fiercely 
answered by Father Tom Burke. Diplomacy 
was embarrassed before he could be induced to 
drop his tour. One of his taunts was never 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 151 

forgotten: "Free nations are not made by- 
playing at insurrection. If Ireland desires to 
be a nation, she must learn not merely to shout 
for liberty but to fight for it." Now this was 
unfair in a land where Irishmen had three 
times taken up arms for liberty. 

The Civil War was fought to its bitter end 
mainly by the three types, Anglo-Saxon, Irish, 
and German, whose survivors might have com- 
bined in time to come to produce an ideal 
American blending of the Celtic and Teutonic 
elements. But the Civil War cut very deep 
into the original stock. The Anglo-Saxon gen- 
try of the South perished. No modern pros- 
perity has made up for the loss of the old blood. 
The German and Irish have been reinforced by 
immigration in a way lacking to the Anglo- 
Saxon. He has fallen behind in a country 
which recognises numbers, but not caste. In a 
book recently published in America, The Pass- 
ing of the Great Race, Mr. Madison Grant says 
what is probably true enough: "If the Civil 
War had not occurred these same men, with 
their descendants, would have populated the 
Western States instead of the racial nonde- 
scripts who are now flocking there." It has 
been those Western States which at the begin- 
ning decided American attitude towards the 



152 THE IRISH ISSUE 

present conflict. A matter of national honour 
is not likely to appeal except to the Celtic and 
Teutonic stocks of America. Of these the most 
vivid of Celtic and Teutonic strains, the Irish 
and the German, outnumber their fellow, the 
Anglo-Saxon. "Two great families of men 
are in the American field, the Teutons and 
the Celts," wrote D'Arcy M'Gee in 1851. As 
Froude sorrowfully recognised, seven years 
after the Civil War, "the Anglo-Saxon power 
is running to seed." The life of equal oppor- 
tunity, unhampered by privilege, has shown 
that there is no race superiority between 
Aryan peoples in America. Influences and 
riches go to the numerous and industrious. 
While the law, language, and legislature can be 
called Anglo-Saxon, the Celtic leaven and the 
huge foreign communities have undermined the 
Anglophile instinct, except in social circles. 
The Irish have become, at any rate, as Ameri- 
canised as the original colonists; and in another 
generation the Germans, who now retain their 
language, will follow suit. How far the original 
type is surviving is becoming doubtful. Per- 
haps Mr. Madison Grant concludes his volume 
a little pessimistically: "If the melting-pot is 
allowed to boil without control, the type of 
native American of Colonial descent will be- 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 153 

come as extinct as the Athenian of the age of 
Pericles." Yet no Irish- American would wish 
to see the Anglo-Saxon as rare on the banks of 
the Hudson as the Redskin on the Mississippi. 
The Celt and the Saxon in America have rec- 
ognised their kindred stock in the Aryan heri- 
tage. They have mixed in the professions and 
in every social circle, and in blood when reli- 
gion would permit. It is in Ireland herself 
that the Irish have not received Aryan recog- 
nition. 

The antagonism of the Celt and the Saxon 
passes beyond the dead hand of the antiquarian, 
and even out of the livelier grasp of the poli- 
tician, when considered in its results to world- 
politics. The Irish driven out of Ireland have 
become something between a lever and a leaven 
in every single part of the empire. Never in 
the majority, they are always the strongest 
amongst minorities. The casting vote and the 
balance of political power comes to them by 
chance or by right. This is even more so in 
the United States, where dwell a majority of 
the whole race, estimated between fifteen and 
twenty millions. The United States were origi- 
nally an extension of the Anglo-Saxon world. 
The English Colonials with strong Irish back- 
ing (chiefly from Ulster) laid down the great 



154 THE IRISH ISSUE 

republic on lines which have since been strained, 
though not sapped, by the incoming hordes 
from east Europe and west Asia. The Anglo- 
Saxon, the Irish, and to a lesser extent the Ger- 
man, have proved the most ready to assimilate 
Americanism. But, to the hordes of Slavs, 
Mediterranean and Levantine types, America 
is little less than a golden caravanserai. Owing 
to them, the tone of national consciousness has 
changed since the Civil War. The American 
"melting-pot" has not yet yielded a corporate 
x\merican nationality. 

The mistake of regarding the Irish as inferior 
at home has been extended into considering 
them negligible when scattered abroad. In 
spite of a generation of signs and warnings, 
England has never made any genuine political 
move or diplomatic advance towards the Irish- 
Americans. This Irish influence runs stiller 
and deeper than any superficial examination 
would show. Few governors of States, few 
elected judges, or representatives, or senators, 
but have to feel and consider at some time the 
weight of the Irish vote, or at least the latent 
strength of Irish opinion. If they reckon the 
Irish press and the professional Irish politicians 
as negligible, they know that Irish opinion is 
not. It runs in the marrow of the United 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 155 

States. It is the ever=ready force that strength- 
ens her arm when she wishes to oppose Eng- 
land, and that slows her hand whenever it is 
proffered in friendship. Washington has never 
countenanced any direct Irish attack on Eng- 
land; and men like John Boyle O'Reilly have 
always been ready to carry through a states- 
manlike bargain between Celt and Saxon. 
Though O'Reilly suffered penal servitude, he 
adopted a wise attitude in the most brilliant of 
Irish- American papers. In 1885 he wrote in 
the Pilot: "One magnanimous statesman in 
England, one leader with the wisdom and cour- 
age of genius, would solidify the British Em- 
pire to-day with a master-stroke of politics. 
Such a policy would silence the dynamiters and 
radicals, satisfy and gratify the Irish people 
throughout the world, strengthen the British 
Empire, and make America thoroughly sympa- 
thetic." It is sad that this is the very cry 
which lovers of Ireland and would-be admirers 
of England felt compelled to reiterate to-day. 
It has been said that Irish nationalism stands 
between Ireland and the light of the world. It 
also stands between England and the love of 
the world. Envoy after envoy has found his 
work at Washington checked and checkered. 
The history of British diplomacy in the United 



156 THE IRISH ISSUE 

States has been one long struggle against Irish 
influences in the dark. 

The important convention agreed upon by 
Reverdy Johnson and Lord Clarendon in Lon- 
don was thrown out in the Senate. Bancroft 
in his Life of Seward clearly traces this to its 
source. "The Fenian movement had increased 
the strong public sentiment in favour of wait- 
ing for an opportunity to retaliate. This was 
such an opportunity." The play and counter- 
play of Irish sentiment in American politics be- 
came more and more marked. Each President 
had to deal with it. President Johnson was 
much at a loss what to do with Fenian raiders 
of Canada. The government could only let 
them down as gently as possible without offend- 
ing England. President Grant was much em- 
barrassed by the Irish mission to the American 
centenary under Parnell, who refused to be 
introduced by the British ambassador. We 
find Alexander Sullivan interviewing President 
Arthur on Irish emigration, and causing diplo- 
matic action thereby which Parnell character- 
ised as "the best slap England had from Amer- 
ica since the War of 1812." 

Sackville-West, whose every move was 
watched and foiled by an intensely active 
Fenian party, actually took refuge, during the 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 157 

time of the Phoenix Park executions, on the 
presidential yacht; and indirectly he owed, in 
the end, his abrupt dismissal to the force of 
Irish opinion. An indiscreet letter from his 
pen at election time gave the Irish Democrats 
a distinct breach of etiquette to work upon, 
and Cleveland handed Sackville-West his pa- 
pers. It was an act of unprecedented rigour, 
but the Irish-Americans were strong enough to 
insist. The Times laid it to Boyle O'Reilly's 
credit, just as Mr. G. W. Smalley gave Senator 
Patrick Collins credit for keeping the Anglo- 
phile minister Phelps from the Supreme bench. 
The nineties brought the Venezuelan crisis. 
The British boundary was based on old Dutch 
rights, and the Venezuelan on Spanish. Eng- 
land refused to arbitrate and Cleveland de- 
manded a commission as an alternative to war. 
Bryce says his motives have never been under- 
stood. The truth is, America had come of 
age, and a reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine 
was in her mounting blood. The Democrats 
had returned to power for the first time since 
the Civil War; and the Irish among them were 
nettled by the rejection of home rule the pre- 
vious year. The Irish and Cleveland found 
their antagonist was the same. Salisbury, the 
postponer of Irish freedom, was an easier and 



158 THE IRISH ISSUE 

welcomer target than Gladstone, whose Civil 
War indiscretions had been forgotten in his 
subsequent liberalism. Cleveland spoke firmly 
in order to avert the possible occasions of war. 
He refused all "supine submission"; and the 
boundary was adjudicated without disturbing 
the rest of Mr. Monroe or the peace of the 
world. 

As the Bayard-Chamberlain Treaty had been 
rejected by the Senate in 1888, so the same 
levers were used by Michael Davitt to work 
the defeat of the Anglo-American Treaty of 
1897. A passage is worth quoting from the 
late Mr. Sheehy Skeffington's Life of Davitt, 
not so much as a missile against England as a 
matter of rumination to those who are most 
concerned with the safety of America or Eng- 
land or Ireland to-day. 

In 1897 the oft-mooted project of an Anglo-American Alli- 
ance was prominently before the public. It was Davitt who 
defeated it. He felt that a special responsibility lay on him 
in this matter. It was largely owing to the movement that 
he had initiated that the minds of Irish- Americans were altered 
so as to make it possible for such a proposition as an alliance 
with Great Britain to be even entertained. In the changed 
situation created by the Gladstone offer of peace and goodwill 
he had rejoiced to find in 1886 the temper of Irish-America so 
friendly towards this measure of conciliation. But England 
had turned her back on Gladstone and had disowned his noble 
efforts to heal the breach between the two nations. Had it 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 159 

been otherwise Davitt himself might have been an ambassador 
of peace making a free Ireland the link between the democra- 
cies of England and America. As it was, he felt that the occa- 
sion was one in which no opportunity ought to be lost of show- 
ing England that she really had something substantial to gain 
from the freedom and friendship of Ireland, apart from the 
intrinsic value of having a contented nation at her side. It 
was the time to teach the world that Irishmen in the United 
States were true to their motherland. So he crossed to the 
States and in a brief campaign in the proper quarters secured 
that the Anglo-American Arbitration Treaty, which was ex- 
pected to be the germ of a formal alliance, should be rejected by 
the United States Senate through the Irish influence in that 
body. 

Cleveland thought it a "wicked thing," 
but it was a transatlantic riposte to the jubilee 
coercion act in Ireland. Nor was it the last 
time that Irish pressure prevailed against 
American friendship for England. The in- 
tensified feeling in America would not permit 
McKinley even to present a flag to the Anglo- 
American hospital ship Maine during the Boer 
War. The celebration of the centenary of the 
Peace of Ghent was largely discounted by 
Irish irritation over the situation in Ulster. 
However anxious the friends of England were 
to oblige her with an official token of alliance, 
it was frustrated on the ground that the Irish 
question remained unsettled. 

For a hundred years, directly or indirectly, 



160 THE IRISH ISSUE 

and unsuspected by their blinded diplomatists 
during most of the time, England and Germany 
had been competing for the winning of America. 
The unforeseen history of the world was yet 
to turn on her # alliance, and there was often as 
good a chance of an understanding with one 
as with the other. Each in turn had contrib- 
uted enormously to the population of the re- 
public, but each in turn incurred its most bit- 
ter hostility, which in Germany's case was to 
prove fatal. England had the American tra- 
dition and the Irish immigration in the scales 
against her, but she had in her favour what 
Bismarck truly called the greatest political fact 
of modern times, "the inherited and permanent 
fact that North America speaks English." 

From the time of Frederick the Great Prus- 
sia manifested a traditional friendship for the 
United States, which might have survived more 
than one European cataclysm. Germany had 
no ambitions in America. German professor- 
dom looked on the American republic as a kind 
of cloud-cuckoodom, to which, however, they 
were very glad to migrate after the revolution 
of 1848, leaving the German people to the 
Junker. The German idealists fought well for 
American idealism in the Civil War, as is 
brought out in the chapter of The Crisis, by 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 161 

Winston Churchill, entitled "Richter's Scar." 
German public opinion and German finance 
were not hostile to the North, In return New 
England feeling favoured the Germans in the 
war of 1870. 

A great German wedge had penetrated the 
Continent and had proven its worth and value. 
During the nineteenth century there were five 
million German immigrants, four million Irish 
and only three million from the rest of Great 
Britain. They combined to turn the scale of 
rivalry against the Anglo-Saxon, who at the 
time of the Revolution had amounted to a 
million and a half, while German and Irish 
were roughly half a million apiece. F. J. 
Turner says of the German settlers: 'With 
their Scotch-Irish neighbours they formed the 
outer edge of the tide of pioneers." With the 
end of the century Anglo-Saxon stock was reck- 
oned twenty million, German as much as 
eighteen, and Celtic, including Scotch and 
Irish, fourteen. The Irish and the German 
did not come into contact, except under church 
auspices. As a rule their settlements did not 
coincide. In his work on the Germans in 
America Fa.ust describes how in Pennsylvania 
"the Germans are most numerous where the 
limestone appears, while the Irish are settled 



162 THE IRISH ISSUE 

on the slate foundations, the Irish taking land 
well-watered near the big rivers arid the Ger- 
mans with a better eye for good land choosing 
that on which there grew the best trees." In 
parts the German overran the Irish. McAll- 
isterstown, an Irish settlement, became Han- 
over. In his History of Virginia Kercheval 
gives a curious account of the German settlers 
caricaturing St. Patrick's Day, while the Irish 
retaliated with a burlesque of St. Michael's. 
But the Celt and the Teuton combined in their 
disregard of Puritanism and Sabbatarianism, 
from which they largely delivered the Ameri- 
can continent. 

The German influences were strictly divided 
into a purely secular and an ecclesiastical line. 
The former developed socialism in America, 
while intellectually it affected the centres of 
American education. As Andrew D. White 
said: "Although Great Britain is generally re- 
garded as the mother of the United States, Ger- 
many has from an intellectual standpoint be- 
come more and more the second mother of the 
American republic." The interchange of pro- 
fessors with Germany and the planting of a 
Teutonic museum at Harvard marked the last 
stage of this tendency. 

Ecclesiastically the Germans threw out great 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 163 

Catholic communities throughout the conti- 
nent, with a tendency to clash with the Irish- 
American hierarchy. Milwaukee produced the 
first German bishopric. Other more or less 
German sees followed. The chief difference 
between the German and Irish Catholics was 
that the former retained their language. From 
the day of their arrival the Germans struggled 
to retain their language in pulpit and school. 
The nationalist movement initiated by Ke- 
hensly, acting from a European source of in- 
spiration, brought it to a crisis. Language was 
opposed to language, churchman to churchman, 
and Pan-Germanism to Americanism. The 
English-speaking Irishmen at the head of the 
church, led by Cardinal Gibbons, opposed and 
defeated the movement as an anti-American 
tendency in the heart of the church. From 
that moment the German language was doomed 
in America. The conflict was too short and 
decisive to leave scars. German Catholics be- 
came the best of citizens in the second and third 
generations. But even in a united church it is 
interesting to trace the racial trenches of Irish 
and German. Of the archbishops as a rule 
some eleven are Irish, three German. Of 
bishops threescore are Irish to ten of German 
name. Of the whole Catholic clergy it is 



164 THE IRISH ISSUE 

claimed that a third have a German name, but 
the great majority of the remainder carry a 
Celtic denominator. 

The German- American would have been glad 
enough to merge himself into America, retain- 
ing the same memory of the Germany which 
had no room for him as the French-Canadian 
does of France. But an unkind destiny had 
turned both America and Germany at about 
the same time to a future on the water. At 
the same time that American fleets were reliev- 
ing Spain of her colonies, German fleets were 
waiting for the chance to gather them up. 
From that moment a tragedy was in store for 
the German- American. Prince Henry of Prus- 
sia administered a friendly warning to Admiral 
Dewey as he left Hong Kong for Manila, but 
Admiral Diedrichs made himself as unpleasant 
to the American fleet as possible. The war 
with Spain was a severe blow to German ex- 
pansion and German-Americans felt that the 
interests of the Fatherland had not been served. 
Carl Schurz wished America to decline the 
Philippines because it meant accepting British 
protection. "British friendship is a good thing 
to have but perhaps not so good a thing to 
need." Holleben induced Pauncefote to sign 
a general plea against the war, which was 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 165 

used afterwards against Anglo-American senti- 
ment. 

But the war with Spain was the occasion 
of restoring the long-lost relations with Eng- 
land. The delivery of Cuba appealed to Eng- 
lishmen, and the unpopularity of the United 
States in Europe drew Americans to their glo- 
riously isolated cousins. While Germany an- 
grily fumbled with her uncompleted fleet, Eng- 
land held the ring in the Far East. The sea 
battle of Manila seemed an echo of the Armada, 
as the last of the "Indies" fell from the hand 
of the Hapsburg. The good feeling engendered 
might have brought about an agreement, had 
there been some common cause or crusade. 
Chamberlain had already meditated the matter 
with Secretary Hay. "Shoulder to shoulder 
we could command peace the world over. I 
should rejoice in an occasion in which we could 
fight side by side." Had it not been for the 
Boer War, England and America might have 
scented a common foe on the horizon. Ger- 
many was intriguing equally with Kruger in 
the Transvaal and Aguinaldo in the Philip- 
pines. But the unhappy Boer War raised a 
torrent of denunciation in America. To a re- 
public, a republic is always a republic. Boer 
commandos seemed conspicuously kin to the 



166 THE IRISH ISSUE 

Revolutionary farmers. Hay wrote mournfully 
in 1900: "If it were not for our domestic poli- 
tics we could and should join with England, 
whose interests are identical with ours, and 
make our ideas prevail. But in the present 
morbid state of the public mind that is not to 
be thought of, and we must look idly on and 
see her making terms with Germany instead 
of us." There was considerable insight in 
Hay's words, for the great unspoken question 
in English diplomacy for a century was whether 
America or Germany was to be her eventual 
ally. The shortsightedness of politicians and 
dynasties favoured the latter. In 1814 Prus- 
sia was an ally, and America a foe. A century 
later began the war which was to reverse the 
situation. Chamberlain had wished to have 
both as allies, but this was not to be. Prussian- 
ism and Americanism cannot dwell together. 

As a result of the defeat of Spain Germany 
had discovered that America was a force in the 
offing of the world to be reckoned with. In 
1899 Secretary Hay wrote: '''The Emperor is 
nervously anxious to be on good terms with us, 
on his own terms, bien entendu." The Boer 
War had dissipated the friendship for England 
which had sprung up in America. There had 
arisen what Hay called "a mad-dog hatred of 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 167 

England" and he lamented, f6 that we should 
be compelled to refuse the assistance of the 
greatest Power in the world in carrying out our 
own policy, because all Irishmen are Demo- 
crats and some Germans are fools, is enough to 
drive a man mad." Before the Boer War was 
ended Germany took the opportunity to send 
Prince Henry on a visit to America to fish dis- 
creetly in anti-British waters. The attitude of 
Germany to her exiles had previously been as 
unto apostates. A great attempt was now 
made to rally their numbers into political sym- 
pathy with the Fatherland. To the German- 
American, Prince Henry appeared in the light 
of a travelling anachronism, but results did fol- 
low his visit. The objects of German diplo- 
macy in America seem to have aimed at over- 
riding the Monroe Doctrine in South America 
in Germany's behalf and checking British influ- 
ence through a resurgence of Irish animosity. 
The Boer War had revived Fenianism, and very 
soon German sympathy began to extend itself 
to the Irish cause. This curious development 
was appreciated at the time by the Irish sage, 
Mr. Dooley, with the combined wisdom of 
saloon and Solon: 

'Twas not long after when I heard a man singing The Wearin' 
of the Green down the street and in come Schwartzmeister. 



168 THE IRISH ISSUE 

"Faugh a ballagh, get out of the way," says he, meaning to be 
polite. "Lieb vaterland," says I, and we had a drink together. 
"Glory be," meditated Mr. Dooley, "who ever thought the 
Irish'd live to see the day when they'd be freed by the Dutch?" 

It was quite possible for the American tradi- 
tion to be hostile to England and her policy to 
be otherwise. This has often been the case in 
modern times, and accounts for the extraordi- 
nary differences of opinion between Washington 
and the American people as a whole towards 
England. The American Government and peo- 
ple have been unitedly hostile against England 
in occasions of stress, during the Venezuela cri- 
sis, during the Civil War, and during the Na- 
poleonic conflict. Otherwise the government 
has not fostered the popular dislike. 

Napoleon had never levied taxes in the 
States, and American feeling was with him 
against England. By the War of 1812 America 
prolonged and intensified the struggle. Yet 
as Mr. Wilson wrote in his History: "Napoleon 
was the enemy of the civilised world, had been 
America's own enemy in disguise and had 
thrown off the disguise. . . . England's policy 
had cut America to the quick and had become 
intolerable and it did not lessen America's 
exasperation that that policy had been a 
measure of war against the Corsican, not 
against her." 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 169 

To substitute "the Brandenburger" for the 
Corsican gives the exact historical parallel with 
which the historian was himself called to deal 
as a maker as well as a writer of American his- 
tory. 

After the Civil War America felt little stom- 
ach for expansion, though the home demesne 
was completed by the purchase of Alaska. 
But the Senate would not allow Seward to ob- 
tain possession of St. Thomas or Grant of San 
Domingo. Only gradually it was realised that 
Cuba and Hawaii were vital strategic points, 
but American interference could only be sanc- 
tioned at home in the guise of humanitarianism. 
The manifest destiny was not yet. 

With the passing of the world drama from 
the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, it seemed 
as though the supreme struggle in the future 
must be for the mastery of the Pacific. Amer- 
ica had touched the Japanese power to birth. 
Russia was hasting towards her faraway out- 
let to the ocean. America and Germany found 
themselves picking up stations in the South 
Seas. Under President Harrison Samoa was 
the scene of some high-souled administration 
on the part of America, which made the subse- 
quent German control particularly bitter to 
the natives. Under Harrison the Queen of 
Hawaii was overthrown and replaced by a pro- 



170 THE IRISH ISSUE 

visional government. The ethics were those of 
a peaceful usurpation, and Cleveland coming 
into office repudiated the action. But the war 
with Spain forced Hawaii into American con- 
trol. It was seen to be the very door-step to 
the Pacific. 

Cuba brought America into the realm of 
world politics. For half a century Cuba had 
lain like Lazarus at America's gates, until her 
sores overflowed, and America intervened. As 
many Americans tried to avert as to precipitate 
the war, which was duly declared and sum- 
marily finished. McKinley was able to claim 
that "no nation was ever more fortunate in 
war or more honourable in negotiations for 
peace." America stood like a Lochinvar among 
nations. At the same time the negotiations 
taught Americans that they had few friends in 
Europe, disclosing to those who had eyes a 
possible ally in England and an incipient 
enemy in Germany. American imperialism and 
pacificism both took tremendous root as a re- 
sult of the war. Corresponding to the "Little 
Englanders," the lesser Americans waxed 
strong, convinced that the whole of the Philip- 
pine archipelago was not worth the life of an 
American boy. 

As a people Americans were still nervous of 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 171 

playing any international role. It was a daring 
advance for Secretary Hay to proclaim "the 
open door" in China, especially as it entailed 
an expedition in company with other Powers 
more predatory than Christian. 

It was in China that American and British 
troops first took the field together, England 
being the first to respond to Hay's idea of an 
"open door." There, too, they shared a com- 
mon revulsion at the atrocities committed by 
the German contingent on the hapless Chinese, 
atrocities hushed up by discreet diplomacy. 
America had become imperial, but with philan- 
thropic reservations. She took over the Pan- 
ama Canal (which incidentally she had dug) 
for the benefit of mankind. She conquered 
Cuba, and to give Cuba freedom she captured 
the Philippines and paid for them afterwards. 
She sent troops to China, but alone of the ag- 
gressive Powers returned her share of the in- 
demnity for educational purposes. She paid 
handsomely for the friars' lands in the Philip- 
pines when confiscation was the European 
precedent, and she has superfluously turned the 
other cheek in Mexico. The fact is that the 
American Government is more Christian than 
any other in its dealings with alien peoples. 

Whether she willed it or not, America had 



172 THE IRISH ISSUE 

become a world Power, Her foreign relations 
by the end of the century bore traces and 
streaks from the international mangle. Mr. 
Dooley brilliantly described them at the time, 
and it is doubtful if the historian could better 
summarise them: 

You will be glad to know that the friendship of this country 
with Germany planted in Samoa and nourished at Manila has 
grown to such a point as to satisfy the most critical German- 
American. With England we are on such terms as must 
please every Canadian but not on any such terms as would 
make any Irishman think we are on such terms as we ought 
not to be! 

The symbol of American imperialism was the 
Panama Canal, which appealed to the Ameri- 
can people as a mystic fulfilment of the original 
dream of Columbus, desiring to sail west to the 
East Indies. The overnight recognition of the 
republic of Panama in the teeth of dilatory 
Colombia and the organised dictatorship under 
which the work was completed struck the note 
of a progressive and imperial Power. 

Later in the year of Prince Henry's visit had 
come a joint challenge to the Monroe Doctrine 
in South America, engineered by Germany, 
which the English Foreign Office must bear the 
discredit of adopting. The attempt of Ger- 
many, France, and England to bring pressure 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 173 

in Venezuela did, however, cause as much anger 
among the English as among the American 
people against the officials of Balfour's govern- 
ment. Before long England began to see the 
necessity of making renunciations and even of 
jettisoning interests to avoid a clash with 
America in any part of the world. In 1896 
Roosevelt had said the Monroe Doctrine would 
be asserted "if Germany sought to acquire 
Cuba from Spain or St. Thomas from the 
Danes." The threat to Venezuela had been 
made to enable Germany to occupy the Mar- 
garita Islands, but though England was acting 
like a blind dupe America was awake in the 
person of her President. Before Roosevelt's 
private ultimatum to Holleben, the German 
ambassador, the threatening warships were 
withdrawn. On the other side, the German 
foreign service defeated every effort of America 
to purchase the Danish West Indies in the 
Danish Parliament, while the Hamburg-Ameri- 
can Line began to pave the way towards a Ger- 
man occupation. But American policy was 
fixed, and by taking over the administration of 
revenue in Nicaragua, Haiti, and San Domingo, 
American officials cleverly prevented the in- 
gress of German creditors. 

Curiously enough, Germany could not har- 



174 THE IRISH ISSUE 

ass America without bringing her closer to 
England and vice versa. Germany's gesticula- 
tions in the open or subterraneous diplomacies 
found England and America in unconscious 
partnership. Germany's efforts to acquire a 
base or a colony in South America were equally 
checked by the Monroe Doctrine and the Brit- 
ish fleet. It was difficult to distinguish the line 
where the opposition of each began or ended, 
so imperceptibly did they coalesce. By 1911 
Maximilian Harden had realised that "Great 
Britain and North America tend to form a 
community of interests. On the two oceans 
the Anglo-Saxons of the two continents group 
themselves together in unity of will." 

A life-and-death struggle now arose in which 
destiny played a stronger part than any diplo- 
macy in fixing or laying the train of America's 
undeveloped international policy, whether it 
should take a hostile or indifferent or co-opera- 
tive attitude towards the British Empire. 
What the British Foreign Office had failed to 
achieve, German militarism brought about. 
Henry Adams could not help remarking: "The 
grisly terror which in twenty years effected 
what Adamses had tried for two hundred 
in vain — frightened England into America's 
arms." 



WINNING THE UNITED STATES 175 

The winning of America was no slight thing 
in the course of the world's history, and it is 
interesting to quote the clearest prophecy on 
the subject, made by Professor A. B. Hart in 
1901: 

"If there is to be in the coming century a 
great battle of Armageddon, once more Europe 
against the Huns, we can no more help taking 
our part with the hosts of freedom than we can 
help educating our children, building our 
churches, or maintaining the rights of the 
individual." It may be inferred that what 
won America to the cause of the Allies was not 
even friendship for France or unity of interest 
with England so much as innate Americanism. 

Nothing is more marked in the thought of 
modern America than the discovery that she 
was being gradually won or induced or tempted 
to enter the international vortex. Europe had 
for so long been thought of in the guise of 
another planet or other world that Paris was 
humorously mentioned as a place where good 
Americans went after death. Like England, 
America had developed an isolation theory. 
England's had broken down under the com- 
bined influence of German pressure and Ed- 
wardian diplomacy, while Olney's algebraical 
equation that "American non-intervention in 



176 THE IRISH ISSUE 

Europe implied European non-intervention in 
America" was found as impracticable as all 
mathematical dicta in practice. American in- 
tervention in Asia was a prelude to the same in 
Europe. It was a long way from Nebraska to 
the summer palace of Pekin, but American arms 
had reached there. Under Hay America had 
begun to protest against the treatment of Jews 
in Russia and Roumania. Every small nation 
in distress tended to appeal to America and 
not to Caesar. The President of the United 
States and not the German Emperor began to 
be hailed as the universal referee. Roosevelt 
once expressed the very proper wish that "our 
questions could be settled on their own merits 
and not complicated by quarrels between Eng- 
land and Ireland or France and Germany." 
In the present crisis of the world America has 
taken a pacificatory part in the former and the 
part of a belligerent in the latter of these his- 
toric quarrels. Their final settlement seems to 
depend more on American intervention than 
on any other element. The United States have 
finally entered the circle of the Powers not 
merely as a co-Power, but as the deciding and 
world-compelling one. The bolts of war and 
the branches of peace are equally in the grip of 
the American eagle. 



X 

IRISH AMERICA DURING THE WAR 

The sentiment of -Irish America during the 
world war, and in particular towards England, 
varied enormously. At moments it was pro- 
nounced, and at others it was impossible to 
define. During the first year it was uncertain 
and, until the Dublin rising, pro-Ally. After the 
executions it was anti-British and with Amer- 
ica's entry into the war it resolved itself into a 
set pro- Americanism. But cross-currents and 
complications, both of history and of psychol- 
ogy, made it as clouded and uncertain generally 
as it was vivid and frank on stirring occasions. 

At the commencement of the war the Celt 
showed himself instinctively anti-Teutonic. 
The bulk of the leading and assimilated Irish- 
Americans, though with violent exceptions from 
the outset, were satisfied at England's entry 
into the war and gladly expectant that Irish 
regiments would share in a speedy redemption 
of Belgium. As regards Ireland, Irish America 
paused. It was realised that the destiny of 

177 



178 THE IRISH ISSUE 

Ireland was in one man's hand. The near ap- 
proach of home rule had left the extremists in 
America in a minority. The apparent political 
triumph of Redmond had placed a huge con- 
stitutional sentiment behind him, which only 
its actuality in the form of an Irish Parliament 
was needed to make amenable to fair diplo- 
macy and reasonable propaganda throughout 
the American continent. But the question was 
whether he would succeed in wresting home 
rule from England or whether England would 
succeed in wresting his prize from him. One 
of the golden hours of history was present, in 
which the silver minutes slowly passed, never 
to return. Subsequent hours were to be of 
iron. 

As soon as it was seen in America that Red- 
mond was recruiting Irishmen as a member of 
the British Commons and not as an Irish pre- 
mier, the position of the extremists became 
clear and their propaganda made way. 

But the great Irish financiers and industrial- 
ists were pro-Ally and with the bulk of Ameri- 
cans of Irish name remained so. The hier- 
archy, chieftained by three Irish cardinals, oc- 
cupied a variety of positions within the largess 
of neutrality. The great German element in 
their flocks naturally proved a counterweight 



IRISH AMERICA 179 

even to the Belgian tragedy, and after the 
Dublin rising the Irish element passed out of 
control, not that the American hierarchy affect 
any political control of their spiritual subjects, 
but that they are generally made responsible 
for any widely expressed view among Catholics. 
There can be no doubt that at times a passing 
view was pro-German or at least pro-Austrian, 
with modifications in favour of Belgium and 
France. That of the Irish rank and file was 
the curious but not inconsistent one of being 
anti-British but pro-French. Admitting dif- 
ferences in degree and circumstance, they were 
equally opposed to Germany in Belgium and 
to England in Ireland. But conclusions were 
liable to be as mixed as motives, some declaring 
they were pro-Ally because they were pro-Irish 
and others that they were pro-German for the 
same reason. Some said they were pro-Ally 
because home rule was a fact, and others that 
they were pro-German because it was not. 
Casement's description of the Home Rule Bill 
as "a promissory note payable after death" 
made it immediately a disintegrating object of 
dispute. 

The first ominous sign was when the Irish 
World withdrew its support from Redmond. 
Under the editorship of Patrick Ford it had 



180 THE IRISH ISSUE 

been to the Irish party what the London Times 
was to the Tories. John Devoy, the editor of 
the Gaelic-American, came out of the wilder- 
ness after obscure but consistent years and 
undertook the championship of Germany. 
Amiable to meet, vitriolic of pen, he came back 
from the past, the last of the real Fenians, but 
as an old soldier of France he must have felt 
a pang that he and Germany were become each 
other's tools. But the iron of the British fet- 
ter had gnawed into his strong soul and he 
made himself the most anti-British editor in 
America. 

Though the Irish-German press became a 
reality, it was not a genuine growth of Irish 
America. It was obviously an attempt to in- 
fluence rather than to express Irish feeling. A 
naively preposterous book called The King, the 
Kaiser, and Irish Freedom was typical of the 
whole attempt to distort Irish sentiment. It 
was written by Mr. McGuire, a previous mayor 
of Syracuse, and figured in the literature of the 
prison camp in Germany, though the statement 
that "Prince von Biilow was a very devout 
Catholic" must have considerably astonished 
any German who chanced to read it. It was 
followed by another volume of which the alle- 
gorical frontispiece seemed to convey as Ger- 



IRISH AMERICA 181 

many's message to Ireland: "All this efficiency 
I will give unto you if you will bow down and 
worship me." 

If the candid historian records such comfort 
and help as the Germans have gleaned from 
some Irishmen in America, it is only fair to em- 
phasise the great silent outburst of loyalty of 
the mass to America after the entry of their 
country into the war, of which the perennial 
testimony will be the impressive and heartening 
manifestoes of the three cardinals and the 
thousands and thousands of Irish- Americans in 
the regular and drafted armies, amounting to 
between 20 and 30 per cent of the whole, whose 
only international politics were the two words, 
"America first!" It was their silent devotion 
and their trustfulness in the meaning of the 
President's message that made American opin- 
ion insistent that Ireland should be included 
among the small nationalities, whose place in 
world democracy was to be made safe. 

The Irish-American press must largely be dis- 
carded as an indicator of the opinion of the 
Irish in America before or after the entry of 
America into the war. 

Amid this flood only the New York Advocate 
can be said amongst Irish papers to have re- 
mained independent, With the new year of 



182 THE IRISH ISSUE 

1916 the sympathisers with Mr. Redmond's 
policy started a weekly organ called Ireland, 
which was brilliantly edited by J. C. Walsh. It 
very soon attracted the intellectual and con- 
servative attention of the race. It was re- 
sponsible for a famous article by Cardinal 
Gibbons, who in giving his recollections of 
Archbishop MacHale stated: 

He had absolutely no faith in armed rebellion. The Young 
Ireland movement of '48 nearly broke his heart. He wanted 
the people to get the land, to have Catholic schools and to 
preserve and love their own language, literature and music. 
He saw the necessity of the Repeal of the Union. He was as 
we should say now, a Home Ruler, but he thought of it rather 
as something which would aid the preservation of Irish na- 
tionality, and he ever believed that Ireland must help herself, 
and that she should not be and ought not to be dependent 
upon any foreign power. As to his attitude to England, it 
was of course, as was to be expected of all Irishmen at that 
time, hostile. But he never thought separation from the Em- 
pire practicable, and he never disliked the English people. 
He ever believed that the English people were neither cognisant 
of nor assented to the acts of the English Government nor the 
English Garrison in Ireland, and he had the warmest affection 
for many individual Englishmen. He would have rejoiced to 
see the day when England should ally herself with France 
and Ireland. 

But the delays and indecisions at home 
gradually sapped the Redmondite position in 
America. The president of the United Irish 
League, Michael J. Ryan, drew aside, and, 



IRISH AMERICA 183 

though Mr. Redmond in loyalty to old friend- 
ship refused to allow his deposition, the League 
wasted away as a popular force, and its place 
in the popular eye was taken by the Friends of 
Irish Freedom and other Sinn Fein organisa- 
tions. 

The great bulk of the Irish remained aloof, 
as suspicious of Germany as their fathers had 
been of England. German propagandists over- 
did their mission. The Clan-na-Gael had an 
able and, because fanatical, a disinterested 
leader in Judge Daniel Cohalan, who showed 
himself ready to go to any length and to make 
any alliance in furtherance of an Irish repub- 
lic. With John Devoy he even welcomed 
German assistance to the rising in Dublin, 
which owing to typical duplicity on the part 
of the Germans was barely forthcoming. 

It is now customary to charge such men 
with receiving German money, but it is to be 
observed that they would have just as eagerly 
assisted France had there been a war with 
England twenty years previously. Painful as 
their action must be to the majority of Irish- 
Americans, it was not done out of love or ad- 
miration of the Germans. As one of them ex- 
cused himself in a phrase that the Germans did 
not particularly appreciate, they would have 



184 THE IRISH ISSUE 

declared themselves pro-Hell had they sufficient 
proof that the devil was anti-British ! 

At different times the greatest variety of 
cooks lent a hand to stirring the Irish-American 
broth. Kuno Meyer, professor of Irish in the 
University of Liverpool, appeared in America 
as though by schedule, in order to proclaim 
German scholarship in the Celtic field. Shortly 
before the outbreak of war a more exciting 
character turned up in New York in Sir Roger 
Casement, who came over for the perfectly ex- 
cusable and open purpose of buying arms to 
counteract Carson's gun-running in Ulster. 
The war carried him off his feet and he could 
only murmur to his host for some days, "Oh, 
the poor Kaiser," from which he settled down 
into an obsession that he was Wolfe Tone redi- 
vivus. Finally he went into Germany as the 
ambassador of the Irish- American extremists. 
From Ireland he carried no commission. After 
his exploit his lieutenant, Captain Monteith, 
escaped to America in the most picturesque 
style of adventure. A more damaging person- 
age to the British empire was Mrs. Sheehy 
Skeffington, who arrived by the underground 
route from Ireland after the murder of her hus- 
band, an incident which if atrocious was not 
condoned. He was a pure intellectual and one 



IRISH AMERICA 185 

of the most advanced thinkers in modern Ire- 
land. He was a man of critical and brilliant 
parts and one of the few convinced pacifists 
who have ever been born in Ireland. He was 
a Dublin Socrates, and like Socrates he was 
unjustly put to death by the militarists, but 
that should hardly have made him an object 
of veneration to the pro-Prussian. Lord and 
Lady Aberdeen courageously toured America 
in Irish interests and were chiefly responsible 
for a translation of the Ford industry to Cork. 

The Sinn Fein were better represented in 
America than the Irish party. In Seumas 
MacManus they had a caustic and lively pen, 
and in Padraic Colum one of the surviving 
poets of the Dublin pleiad. But Colum was a 
poet before a politician and he hymned the 
dirge of Casement and Kettle equally. The 
chief propagandist of the Redmondite persua- 
sion was Patrick Egan, who in his remarkable 
career from an Irish conspirator to a United 
States minister had won the confidence of 
three remarkable men- — Parnell, Blaine, and 
Balmaceda. He issued a direct challenge to 
the Irish-German entente to which there could 
be no reply. 

The extremists received less encouragement 
from Ireland than in America herself. Apart 



186 THE IRISH ISSUE 

from the old relentless Fenians, there were 
powerful groups in America who for reasons 
often widely unconnected with Ireland were 
disposed to encourage a strong anti-British 
sentiment amongst the Irish. 

But the German propaganda amongst the 
Irish drew its strongest support from English 
politicians. The entry of Carson into the Cabi- 
net was a climax to many minds and took off 
the edge of any Irish desire to avenge the sink- 
ing of the Lusitania. Thanks to the press gib- 
betings of several years, Carson had come to 
appear to the Irish-American in much the same 
light as the Kaiser appears to the London cock- 
ney. It was taken as a sign that home rule 
would be scotched if not nullified. 

During the next twelvemonth Irish opinion 
was wallowing as heavily in the trough of the 
waves as the official opinion of America, equally 
irritated, irrational, and irresolute. Irish- 
Americans, in spite of their press, did not know 
what to think or do. In the spring of 1916 an 
Irish race convention was staged by huge and 
galvanic effort in New York. Its effect was 
slight, except so far as it may have ministered 
to the smouldering embers in Dublin. The 
presence of pro-Germans caused it to be avoided 
and ridiculed by leading Irishmen, who a few 



IRISH AMERICA 187 

weeks later, on the suppression of the rising, 
were openly and intensely anti-British them- 
selves. There was always a large and inde- 
pendent party of prominent Irishmen, who 
viewed Ireland artistically or historically rather 
than politically. They disliked to think that 
their citizenship could be compromised or hy- 
phenated by a group of men who had assumed 
a dictatorship over Irish opinion in America. 
It was only on rare occasions that such a group 
showed itself. Between the rising and the 
executions the first professor in the new Dublin 
University to visit America was entertained by 
the really leading Irishmen to a banquet in 
honor of "intellectual home rule." Of the five 
hosts, John D. Ryan, of Butte, Mont., rep- 
resented the Irish millionaire, the type of silent, 
indefatigable business man that the Celtic race 
is supposed to be unable to produce. John 
Quinn, described as the most anti-Prussian in- 
dividual in the States, yet a personal friend of 
Casement, epitomised the Gaelic culture, the 
battles of whose poets and playwrights he had 
fought in America. James Byrne was a leader 
of the Irish-American bar, and Judge Keogh a 
lifelong friend of Redmond. Bourke Cockran 
represented Irish eloquence. His three ora- 
tions during the war were delivered in consis- 



188 THE IRISH ISSUE 

tent sequence on behalf of Armenia* Ireland, 
and Belgium. 

The effect of the Dublin rising was, of course, 
to put the Clan-na-Gael into the saddle. A 
great anti-British outburst took place, followed 
by a grim suspicion that Germany had not 
played quite fair. The Clan-na-Gael organised 
a famous meeting in Carnegie Hall, to which 
prominent and moderate Irishmen went on the 
understanding that the meeting was a memo- 
rial and not a political one. However, the 
German anthem was played before they reached 
the platform. In the course of his speech 
Bourke Cockran was interrupted by cries of 
"Down with England," to which he replied: 
"I say not down with England but up with 
Ireland." The meeting was as much misrep- 
resented by the champions as by the enemies 
of Ireland. 

There could be no doubt but that the shots 
of the firing-squad in Dublin were heard all 
round the world. As Lord Acton once wrote 
of the Phoenix Park murders, "the true moral 
of this catastrophe can never be made visible 
to the average Englishman." The bungled ne- 
gotiations which followed did not assuage the 
bitterness. Then it became obvious why the 
cynical Bernstorff was the strongest anti- 



IRISH AMERICA 189 

home-ruler in the States, and why the generous 
wisdom of the British ambassador shared the 
distress common to all Irishmen of good-will. 

The episode of Dublin afforded an interlude 
to the drama of Verdun in the American press. 
The features of the Irish leaders swam into the 
glass, blurred by a halo of blood. The Irish 
section of America then was straitly and fiercely 
roused. Thousands and thousands made them- 
selves heard, to whom Dublin was still a lost 
Zion and the fallen capital of their race, and to 
whom Ireland acts as a magnet, a lodestar, a 
dream, an inspiration, a blood-madness. 

During the week of the Dublin revolt, when 
news was coming in uncertain scraps, the voice 
of Irish America was lifted not unlike the 
chorus of a Greek tragedy, given over to ap- 
prehension, memories, and query, while some 
foredestined crime is occurring within. It was 
possible to know Irishmen in the streets of 
New York by their expression. Sorrow, anxi- 
ety, exaltation, and a tangle of atavistic feel- 
ings were struggling in their features. The his- 
torical dislike of the Sassenach was struggling 
against a certain distrust of participation with 
the German. The effect of the rising was one 
thing. The effect of the executions was an- 
other. Then the Irish remembered Robert 



190 THE IRISH ISSUE 

Emmet and knew where they stood. They 
were roused on a sensitive point and an out- 
burst of lyrical anger swept through the con- 
tinent from New York to the Golden Gates. 
It all hinged on the question of the executions. 
It was felt that only Irishmen had the right to 
put down a rising in Ireland. That only a con- 
stituted Irish government had the right to con- 
demn Irishmen to death. And there was none 
except on paper. There would have been no 
fierce outburst of horror had the insurgent 
leaders been shot down in hot blood behind 
their own barricades. A government in pos- 
session is bound to meet arms with arms. 
Those who were slain in the fighting slew and 
were slain. They had taken up the sword and 
they perished by the sword. The event sur- 
passed all hopes of the extremists who were 
watching from America what looked like a 
fiasco. They had launched a rising of franc- 
tireurs and they reaped a harvest of martyrs. 
What need not have been more than an ex- 
tended riot was raised to the dignity of a revo- 
lution. The suicidal folly of the rising as an 
appeal to arms was entirely forgotten in the 
dramatic deaths of the leaders. Sinn Feiners 
limited in numbers and officials limited in 
imagination had combined to play the German- 



IRISH AMERICA 191 

American game beyond German dreams. Sat- 
isfaction was not unexpressed at the timely 
arrival of a fresh batch of Irish martyrs on the 
horizon just as Manchester and Mitchelstown 
were retreating into the past. Deep in their 
mugs German- Americans toasted British rule in 
Dublin ! But in a thousand American homes 
Irish women and children cried themselves to 
sleep. 

The great swing of Irish sentiment actually 
amounting to pro-Germanism might seem one 
of the most illogical and harebrained moves 
even to the credit of the Irish, but it can be 
explained on psychological grounds as easily 
as it can be regretted for national reasons. 
Each nationality in the States had from time 
to time found a vent for their hyphenated emo- 
tion, except the Irish, who had waited and 
waited, pained by the casualties, impatient for 
home rule, and irritated by German sugges- 
tions. They yearned for heroics, for Irish vic- 
tories in the field and for the restoration of a 
national parliament. Generals failed to give 
them the one and statesmen hesitated to per- 
mit them the other. When the Dublin revolt 
broke out, the inevitable occurred in America. 
The Irish snatched at the husks of a week's 
disastrous victory and in place of the promised 



192 THE IRISH ISSUE 

parliament to sit in the Bank of Ireland hailed 
the republic in the post-office. The nature of 
the connections between Ireland and America 
were seen to be more than sentimental. They 
were subtle, telepathic, and even hysterical. 
Ireland is liable to act under certain circum- 
stances as bravely, as fiercely, as illogically as 
a woman, and her exiles are liable to act as 
immoderately as those who are in love with a 
woman. 

Celt and Saxon had long been grappling with 
each other in the American arena. The prize 
was public opinion. In time of peace, English 
diplomatists could dally with the famous pass- 
word that blood was thicker than water, but in 
the day of his supreme test the Anglo-Saxon 
needed American opinion and even American 
support behind him. The German was power- 
less to affect American opinion without the in- 
valuable help of the Celt. "Prussia fears the 
Celtic political will in America more than she 
fears the English of England," wrote Francis 
Grierson. Bernstorff had realised the strength 
of Irish America and made a clumsy attempt to 
harness it to his schemes through the Clan-na- 
Gael leaders, whose messages he despatched to 
Germany. The ultimate failure of the "Bar- 
bier de Sayville," as he was known in diplo- 



IRISH AMERICA 193 

matic circles, was not displeasing to Irish 
opinion, which was much more appreciative of 
Spring-Rice's undemonstrative sympathy. As 
an American cardinal remarked, "while carry- 
ing out his duty as a British ambassador he has 
not forgotten he is an Irishman." 

If the "Celt and the Saxon" was the oldest 
of feuds in British history it is also the last and 
latest. The Irish trouble has ceased to be 
merely a local sore or latent affliction. It has 
become a world-wide and pronounced irrita- 
tion, which the past year has seen intensified in 
every limb of empire. Gardiner once wrote of 
Anglo-Irish relations, that whereas "the Eng- 
lish sovereigns had been confronted by a con- 
geries of Irish tribes, the English common- 
wealth was confronted by an Irish nation." 
To-day the British Empire is met and queried 
by a great and international brotherhood of 
Irish blood within and without her borders, 
upon whose undiminishing devotion to Ireland 
the sun never sets. Let none set aside as an 
obscure domestic quarrel the crisis that came 
simultaneously in the relations between Eng- 
land and Ireland as well as in the relations be- 
tween America and England. Diplomatists do 
not like to admit, and politicians for equally 
obvious reasons seek to conceal, the real heart 



194 THE IRISH ISSUE 

of controversy between England and America. 
"By our methods in Ireland we have sown 
dragon's teeth in every quarter of the world," 
wrote T. W. Russell, member of an adminis- 
tration which has since sharpened rather than 
blunted them. 

The aftermath of the rising was the pro- 
tracted and painful trial of Roger Casement, 
on which Irish attention in America was closely 
fixed until his execution. The most strenuous 
efforts were made by both his friends and 
critics in America to obtain a reprieve. Owing 
to conflicting accounts as to his motives, both 
extremists and moderates were for different 
reasons in favour of his pardon, except a few 
who gave the painful impression of feeling that 
it would be best for his reputation as a patriot 
to suffer the extreme penalty. In this as in 
one or two other matters the British Govern- 
ment showed themselves willing to oblige. A 
petition bearing the very best names in Irish 
America was forwarded in vain. After his ex- 
ecution a judicial but striking article from John 
Quinn appeared in the New York Times. It 
was strongly written and it smote friend and 
foe. After bearing witness to the Quixotic 
chivalry of Casement, he commented: "His ex- 
ecution was just what Germany then needed to 



IRISH AMERICA 195 

offset the execution of Captain Fryatt." Un- 
sparing of the English methods of treating 
Casement in the press, he had a word to say, 
also, of Germany: 

England sprang the trap that took his life. Germany pushed 
him into that trap. Germany needed a diversion then and so 
like Judases they betrayed the man who had trusted them. 
If England was pitiless, Germany's act was infamous. 

An attempt was made to bring some moral 
charge against Casement after his death, which 
the American press declined to handle, and 
owing to private protests the matter was 
ended. But the echoes and counter-echoes 
in Irish America were lasting. Casement had 
made a sorry mess of his career, but the 
British Government seemed to have blundered 
even more, was the summary of American 
opinion. 

The arrest of John McNeill, after doing a 
man's share in heading off the rising, was a 
cause of varied opinion in America. Owing to 
the resentment of the extremists at the part he 
had taken, many of his friends thought it best 
he should remain in prison for a while and dree 
his weird. In view of his unique attainments 
as a Celtic scholar, a movement was made for 
his release. A report of his trial was obtained 



196 THE IRISH ISSUE 

privately and an application for pardon made 
on his behalf by John Quinn and the present 
writer. The British Government were ap- 
proached and found amenable, but their clem- 
ency was negatived from Dublin unless Mc- 
Neill should give a pledge to take no further 
part in politics during the war, which he was 
unwilling to do. After the entry of America 
into the war, suggestions were brought to bear 
by Lord Shaughnessy and Sir Charles Fitz- 
Patrick from Canada and by the British 
embassy in Washington. The Cabinet then 
decided to release all the political prisoners. 

The execution and imprisonment of Sinn 
Feiners in Ireland proved the ruin of the Red- 
mondite organisation in America. Soon after 
the rising Mr. Redmond had taken the ground 
that the affair was an attack on home rule and 
had cabled to the editor of Ireland: 



The attempt to torpedo Home Rule and the Irish Party has 
failed. Damage has been done, life has been lost, but the ship 
has not been sunk. The whole thing has been organised by 
those in Ireland and in America who have always been the 
open and irreconcilable enemies of Home Rule and of the 
Irish Party. Though the hand of Germany was in the whole 
thing, it was not so much sympathy for Germany as hatred 
of Home Rule and of us which was at the bottom of the move- 
ment. It was even more an attempt to hit us than to hit 
England. 



IRISH AMERICA 197 

Whether Germany had a hand in it or not, 
there could be no doubt of his further words : 

that the one security for good order as well as good gov- 
ernment in Ireland is a native executive and Parliament backed 
by Irish opinion, and that if such an executive had been in 
existence during the last six months there would have been 
no Dublin riot. 

Though individual friends stood by Mr. 
Redmond, headed by Judge Keogh, Stephen 
McFarland, Michael Jordan, and men of 
similar integrity, there was a clean sweep of 
Redmondite popularity, chiefly on the ques- 
tion as to whether the Irish party were respon- 
sible for the executions. The statement that 
they had cheered the news in the House of 
Commons was disproved, but it is difficult to 
say who succeeded in averting the further 
executions which were contemplated by the 
authorities. Mr. Redmond did his full share. 
Sir Francis Vane's prompt action against or- 
ders had its effect as well as the cable message 
which Cardinal Gibbons sent through Sir Cecil 
Spring-Rice to London. Mr. Roosevelt's frank 
opinion that the mishandling of Ireland was 
not a blunder but a crime became known to 
friends of the Allies. 

The Irish party failed to be represented in 
America until an Irish commission, consisting 



198 THE IRISH ISSUE 

of T. P. O'Connor and Richard Hazleton, M.P., 
made its appearance, when Irish America 
was no longer on speaking terms with the 
Irish party. On the evening of their arrival 
the friends of Mr. Redmond held a public 
meeting in memory of Major Willie Red- 
mond in New York, which though in the 
nature of a funeral service, was interrupted by 
Sinn Feiners. Mayor Mitchel delivered the 
eulogy of the dead. To the Sinn Feiners he 
addressed himself in words which received loud 
applause, and epitomised real Irish-American 
feeling: 

I want to say to those who in sincerity are so blinded by a 
prejudice for which God knows I cannot blame them, for it is 
the product of 700 years of mistreatment, that they cannot 
see into the present situation and understand it. I want to 
tell them that here is an issue so vital to the world that preju- 
dice must be sunk and all who love liberty must band together. 

The bitterness felt towards Mr. Redmond 
was assuaged in a great degree by his brother's 
death. As an Irish writer wrote to him from 
America: 

That he has died for Ireland and effectively for Ireland, there 
is no doubt in this country, even among those who have been 
most opposed to the Irish Party. Prayers for his soul have 
been frequent in the churches and his singularly beautiful 
will has touched the wayward heart of our whole race. As 



IRISH AMERICA 199 

an event it has electrified America. It is felt that you have 
paid the price of liberty in your own person and in the blood 
of your own kin, and the sympathy for you is greater than you 
can imagine. 

The entry of America had brought the Irish 
question to a climax, as Lord Northcliffe was 
astute enough to realise, for the London Times 
was thrown open to American opinion. Roose- 
velt, Taft, and Cardinal Gibbons were among 
those who answered. Roosevelt felt that "both 
permanently and as regards this particular war 
it would be an immense advantage to the em- 
pire to give Ireland home rule." Taft believed 
"It would much help to solidify and hearten 
American public sentiment in the great cause." 
Cardinal Gibbons compared Ulster to the 
American South and added: "Separate nation- 
alities must be recognised, but no nation can 
be permanently divided. Since I have been 
asked, then the only way I see out of the diffi- 
culty is the way of guarantees. The present 
position is impossible. Ireland cannot be sac- 
rificed to a few counties in Ulster. These few 
counties cannot be sacrificed to the rest of 
Ireland." 

American opinion seriously confronted the 
British Commission, which under Mr. Balfour 
visited the country. Northcliffe's cable that 



200 THE IRISH ISSUE 

Mr. Balfour had it in his power to settle the 
Irish question raised little less than an agita- 
tion in Washington. A hundred representa- 
tives in Congress cabled to Lloyd-George in 
Ireland's behalf. Mr. Balfour received a depu- 
tation which may be described as representing 
the cream of the Irish contribution to America. 
It consisted of Justice Morgan O'Brien, of the 
New York Supreme Court, Colonel Robert Em- 
met, a descendant of Emmet's brother, a Prot- 
estant and a West Pointer, former Mayor John 
Fitzgerald of Boston, Lawrence Godkin, of the 
New York bar, son of the veteran Irish cham- 
pion yet friend of England, and John Quinn. 

Mr. Balfour stated that it was a mystery to 
him how Irishmen whose sympathy with the 
Poles was traditional, could be pro-German in 
this war, when they contrasted Germany's 
treatment of Poland during the last century 
with England's actions in Ireland during the 
same time. He added that while he had no 
authority to speak for the Cabinet on the ques- 
tion of home rule, he had been profoundly im- 
pressed by the representative character of the 
delegation and the moderation of the views ex- 
pressed, and that he believed that they repre- 
sented not merely Irish -American opinion gen- 
erally, but the desires of the vast mass of the 



IRISH AMERICA 201 

American people, that the Irish question should 
be settled to the satisfaction of Ireland, and 
that he would cable to the Cabinet the opinion 
of the delegation that a prompt settlement of 
the home rule question, without excluding any 
part of Ireland, would be hailed with satisfac- 
tion not merely by representative Irishmen but 
by Americans generally. 

A somewhat mysterious element had been 
the President's attitude towards home rule in 
spite of his explicit sentiment in favour of the 
small nations. Himself both of Scotch-Irish 
and Celtic stocks, he cherished the normal 
American view as to Irish freedom. In spite 
of the old Irish alliance with the Democrats, he 
was bitterly attacked by the extremists before 
his second election and so violently even, that 
he administered a public rebuke by telegram 
to one of their number. 

The voting at the presidential election was 
very confused. Many of the Irish fell away 
on the Mexican question. A number of the 
old Democrats, like John Crimmins, supported 
the President and later found themselves in a 
position to do Ireland a conspicuous service. 

Mr. Crimmins, as the doyen of loyal Irish- 
Americans, addressed a private letter to the 
President, in which he wrote: 



202 THE IRISH ISSUE 

It would be most timely and would have the heartfelt grati- 
tude of millions of people in this and other lands, who have 
long hoped, and many prayed, for Ireland as a small nation 
to have autonomy, thereby establishing peace with England 
and among English-speaking people. Then if an emergency 
should arise there would be all for one, and one for all. Mr. 
President, you have gone a long step in that direction in de- 
claring the rights of small nations — another step may be the 
means of reaching the goal for the Irish people. 

The reply from the President's secretary was 
to assure Mr. Crimmins "of the President's 
keen interest in this matter, and of the fact 
that in every way he properly can he is showing 
his sympathy with the claim of Ireland for 
home rule." 

The keen-sighted extremists seem to have 
calculated that Wilson by carrying the solid 
South and the West would be in a position to 
enter the war with a united country in a way 
difficult if not impossible to Hughes should he 
be elected, with only the East and a part of the 
West. That a Democrat President in his sec- 
ond term was an approximation to war un- 
doubtedly induced the extremists among the 
Irish to approach Hughes and work for his 
election. On the other hand, it was clear that 
Bernstorff and his American friends desired 
Wilson's re-election, as usual reckoning with- 
out their host. 



IRISH AMERICA 203 

However, just as many Irish and Germans 
voted for Wilson, on the ground that he would 
keep the country out of war, as for Hughes, 
on the ground that whether he wished to or 
not, he would be unable to do otherwise. 

The entry of America into the war did not 
cut the ground from under the Irish-German 
press, for they skilfully altered it to an extreme 
pro-American attitude demanding that Ameri- 
can interest could be best served by an imme- 
diate peace. The President's statements in 
favour of democracy roused a most agitated 
Irish comment, which found vent in prolonged 
but representative correspondences in the 
New York Evening Post and the Jesuit w T eekly 
America. The protagonists on the constitu- 
tional side were Doctor Sigourney Fay and the 
present writer. They received pulverising re- 
plies from Judge Cohalan, John Devoy, and 
Mrs. Sheehy Skeffington, on the Sinn Fein 
point of view/ 

In a rejoinder the present writer suggested: 

I believe it would be a masterstroke on England's part to 
accept an Irish republic, for the first business of an Irish re- 
public would be to effect a defensive alliance with England 
against the occupation of Ireland by any foreign foe. A Ger- 
man coaling-station, for instance, would be excluded from Ire- 
land out of friendship for the United States, as well as from 
the practical consideration that it is not to Ireland's advantage 



204 THE IRISH ISSUE 

for England to be conquered by Germany. To be frank, it is 
undeniable that England's losses and difficulties during the 
war have led her to take a more serious view of Irish claims. 
But her total defeat would prevent any view being taken at 
all favourable or unfavourable, for Ireland would be engulfed 
in her collapse. The reduction of England from the position 
of "Premier Power" to an equality with France and America 
in the world's democracy is good for both Ireland and Eng- 
land herself. But a conquest of England or the payment of 
indemnity to Germany would fall as unpleasantly on Ireland 
as on the United States. Miserable as it is to think of an 
English army of occupation in Ireland to-day, a German army 
of invasion would be far worse. 

In his remarkable article replying to mine, Judge Cohalan, 
whose extreme devotion to Ireland Dublin Castle has certainly 
tried to justify, gives the impression that his mind tends 
towards the Apocalyptic view, common to all the Messianic 
nations, in regard to all Power Imperial. Just as the broken 
Jews and the persecuted Christians ever harped on the com- 
ing overthrow of Babylon and Rome, much of Irish mystico- 
political writing foreshadows the destruction of England. 
However, this has been postponed by the action of the United 
States and it is well to consider the more practical necessities 
of the situation. 

Judge Cohalan recalls the interesting fact that the submarine 
which has all but imperilled England to-day, was reduced to 
a practical form by Holland, an Irishman. Possibly its origi- 
nal aim was that winch it has only just, and I think happily, 
failed to accomplish. It is equally curious that Lord Acton, 
when occupying the history chair of Cambridge, was asked 
to name the moment of England's greatest peril and answered 
with one of those brilliant impromptus of which his learning 
was capable: The day that Fulton offered his steamboat to the 
French Government. It was refused by the latter, but the 
moral lies in the fact that Fulton's father was born in Kilkenny. 

The moral of to-day is that the submarine jeopardises Ire- 



IRISH AMERICA 205 

land just as much as England. The rightful solution of the 
Irish problem is as vital to England to-day as to Ireland. 

In conclusion Ireland's greatest international 
asset has been and always will be the feeling 
which Americans have for those who have be- 
come Americans without losing their Irish qual- 
ities. To make the most of this, Irish opinion 
in America should be mobile. It should not 
be nailed to certain words and phrases contain- 
ing the maximum of exasperation and the mini- 
mum of placability. It should be as capable 
of accepting the olive-branch as of administer- 
ing criticism. It should be a force sensible of 
results, open to justice, fluid, amenable, inde- 
pendent, generous, yet stern — above all, un- 
swerving in the interest of the Irish cause as 
an international and not merely as a local ques- 
tion. To such a force statesmen and diploma- 
tists would listen — if not with agreement, at 
least with attention. 

Irish America is not the blinded, brainless 
stratum of society that her enemies would have 
us believe. Eyes she hath, and seeth. Brains 
she hath, and thinketh. But she goeth her 
own way — which is a thousand ways — and her 
strength and influence as a legitimate force in 
international questions are dissipated. Few 
Irish writers in America have perceived this 



206 THE IRISH ISSUE 

vision as well as John Boyle O'Reilly, who 
wrote in the Pilot: "Irishmen exercising in 
America the power of their moral force are a 
leaven to be heeded more by English statesmen 
than the armed rebellion of the same men or 
of their fathers in Ireland." 

From America Sir Horace Plunkett sped to 
Dublin to assume the chairmanship of the Irish 
convention. 



EPILOGUE 

So winds the woof. So sags the skein. If 
Ireland cannot be separated from England, 
she cannot be isolated from America. Out of 
the American Revolution and Civil War was 
bred an Irish-American issue, which Mitchel 
and Parnell did no more than shape at the 
time. Sinn Fein has since caused convulsion 
to the Irish cause but not collapse. It abides 
decision. No great American has felt other- 
wise than Motley when he wrote fifty years 
ago: "Justice, Truth, and Faith are immu- 
table. Imagine that Ireland had been always 
dealt with since the days of the Plantagenets 
in accordance with those principles. Would 
there have been an Irish Question at this mo- 
ment striking down to the foundations of the 
Empire ? " 

Few great Englishmen but feel the same 
to-day. America will not pass over the Truth. 
England cannot allow her own Faith to be 
questioned, and Ireland can only do that 
Justice to the allied cause which is not out- 
side of justice to herself. Fiat Justitia> mat 
Germania ! 

207 



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